![]() We'd been applying to various telescopes to get more observations for many, many years and my proposals always failed," said Seth. "I knew that the B023-G078 object was one of the most massive objects in Andromeda and thought it could be a candidate for a stripped nucleus. For years, Seth had a feeling it was something else. ![]() However, there had only been a single observation of the object that determined its overall mass, about 6.2 million solar masses. 11, 2022, in The Astrophysical Journal.ī023-G078 was known as a massive globular star cluster - a spherical collection of stars bound tightly by gravity. "I think this is a pretty clear case that we have finally found one of these objects." We knew that there must be smaller black holes in lower mass stripped nuclei, but there's never been direct evidence," said lead author Renuka Pechetti of Liverpool John Moores University, who started the research while at the University of Utah. "Previously, we've found big black holes within massive, stripped nuclei that are much bigger than B023-G078. What's left behind is a tiny, dense nucleus orbiting the bigger galaxy and at the center of that nucleus, a black hole. Stripped nuclei are remnants of small galaxies that fell into bigger ones and had their outer stars stripped away by gravitational forces. Long thought to be a globular star cluster, the researchers argue that B023-G078 is instead a stripped nucleus. The black hole was hidden within B023-G078, an enormous star cluster in our closest neighboring galaxy Andromeda. That's a large gap," said senior author Anil Seth, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Utah and co-author of the study. "We have very good detections of the biggest, stellar-mass black holes up to 100 times the size of our sun, and supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that are millions of times the size of our sun, but there aren't any measurements of black between these.
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