When Farrell and his colleagues discovered HLX-1in 2009, it was the first intermediate-mass black hole known.
Using their most conservative assumptions, Dr Bockelmann and colleagues found that even if every globular cluster started out with an intermediate mass black hole, only about 30% retained them through successive mergers.
"The fact that there's a very young cluster of stars indicates that the intermediate-mass black hole may have originated as the central black hole in a very low-mass dwarf galaxy, "Sean Farrell, of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia, said in a statement.
Depending on its initial mass, it might collapse to a compact hot star known as a white dwarf (when the star's mass is less than 1.4 times the mass of our sun) or to a neutron star (for stars 1.4 to about three times the mass of our sun) or to a black hole (for stars more massive than three times the mass of our sun).
In the galaxy NGC 1277, astronomers have discovered a black hole with the mass of 17 billion suns.
FORBES: Astronomers Find One Of The Biggest Supermassive Black Holes Yet
Ascertaining the binary nature of the system also allowed the astronomers to make their accurate measurement of the bigger black hole's mass.
Even though the black hole contains a mass equal to a billion suns, it is compacted into an area about the size of the solar system.
Using their new technique, they estimated the black hole has a mass of some 900 billion trillion trillion tonnes - on the heavy side even in the supermassive stakes.
Using these two instruments, the scientists were able to examine the event and determine that the mass of the planet being devoured by the black hole was somewhere between 14-30 times that of Jupiter.
FORBES: Scientists Catch A Black Hole Munching On A Giant Planet
These winds are generated in a swirling mass of matter around the equatorial region of a black hole, the accretion disk.
Even more fascinating, the supermassive black hole is about 14% of the total mass of the galaxy.
FORBES: Astronomers Find One Of The Biggest Supermassive Black Holes Yet
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a colossal black hole at its core, too, which is some three million times the mass of our Sun.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Deepest X-rays tell merger story
When this sort of star implodes, to create a black hole, it generates jets of material that punch their way out of the collapsing mass at near light-speed, to produce extremely high-energy emissions of light.
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