Black holes demolish thousands of nearby stars to fuel growth, reveals new Chandra study

A new survey of over 100 galaxies has found that black holes raze thousands of stars and use their remains to pack on weight. This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, could help explain how intermediate-mass black holes are formed through the runaway growth of a much smaller black hole.

While astronomers have previously found many examples of black holes tearing stars apart, little evidence has been seen for destruction on such a large scale, NASA said.

"When stars are so close together like they are in these extremely dense clusters, it provides a viable breeding ground for intermediate-mass black holes. When stars are so close together like they are in these extremely dense clusters, it provides a viable breeding ground for intermediate-mass black holes," explains Vivienne Baldassare of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, who led the study.

Intermediate-mass black holes are the missing link between stellar-mass black holes that typically weigh 5 to 30 times the mass of the Sun and supermassive black holes that weigh millions or even billions of solar masses.

Theoretical work by the researchers implies that if the density of stars in a cluster crosses the threshold value, a stellar-mass black hole at the center of the cluster will undergo rapid growth as it pulls in, shreds, and ingests the abundant stars in close proximity. In this Chandra study, clusters with density above this threshold were about twice as likely to contain a growing black hole as the ones below the density threshold.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Looking like a concert mosh pit, mid-sized black holes are thought to begin in densely crowded parts of the universe. Evidence from @ChandraXRay Observatory suggests small runaway black holes grow by impacting thousands of nearby stars: https://t.co/NgO5NBnC2W pic.twitter.com/zWgXaZ58wd

— NASA (@NASA) April 20, 2022