A rare black hole is lurking 6,000 light-years away in Earth's cosmic backyard

Astronomers, with the help of the Hubble telescope, have now detected a rare intermediate-size black hole.

This black hole is hiding the Earth's cosmic backyard at a distance of 6,000 light-years away within a globular star cluster.

The iconic Hubble Space Telescope has been used by astronomers to observe a compact region of space which has a mass of 800 Suns and is likely to be a black hole.

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As per a press statement, the scientists claimed that they had discovered the “best evidence yet for the presence of a rare class of intermediate-sized black holes.”

The intermediate-mass black hole candidate is located nearly 6,000 light-years away and the nearby star cluster Messier 4's core.

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It is an ultradense region of space filled with the mass of 800 suns, which leads to nearby stars orbiting it like "bees swarming around a hive," as per the researchers who detected it.

In a statement, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland's study lead authorand astrophysicist Eduardo Vitral said, "It's too tiny for us to be able to explain other than it being a single black hole. Alternatively, there might be a stellar mechanism we simply don't know about, at least within current physics."

How did the scientists detect black holes?

The data collected by the European Space Agency's star-mappingGaia spacecraft was used by the team to study the chaotic motion of stars at M4's centre.

In this region, they are trapped in the gravitational field of suspected black holes, "like bees swarming around a hive," said the team members.

"If the object isn't a single intermediate-mass black hole, it would require an estimated 40 smaller black holes crammed into a space only one-tenth of a light-year across to produce the observed stellar motions," wrote team members, in the same statement.

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"The consequences are that they would merge and/or be ejected in a game of interstellar pinball," he added.

What are intermediate-mass black holes?

Intermediate-mass black holes, which range between 100 to 100,000 times the sun's mass, are among the most elusive black holes present in the universe.

Although scientists have found several promising candidates, they have not confirmed the existence of any intermediate-mass black holes.

In a statement, project scientist at the Gaia telescope Timo Prusti said, "Science is rarely about discovering something new in a single moment. It’s about becoming more certain of a conclusion step by step, and this could be one step towards being sure that intermediate-mass black holes exist."

(With inputs from agencies)