{"id":665334,"date":"2025-12-31T19:56:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T19:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/665334\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T19:56:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T19:56:10","slug":"supermassive-black-hole-on-a-collision-course-with-the-milky-way-science-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/665334\/","title":{"rendered":"Supermassive black hole on a \u2018collision course\u2019 with the Milky Way | Science | News"},"content":{"rendered":"

A supermassive black hole<\/a> residing within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – a satellite galaxy – is on a collision course with the Milky Way<\/a>, a recent study revealed. The LMC’s supermassive black hole is believed to be the closest of its kind outside our galaxy, located approximately 160,000 light-years away and one of the nearest galactic neighbours to our own.<\/p>\n

To make this discovery, researchers traced the paths of 21 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way using data from the European Space Agency’s\u00a0Gaia mission<\/a> – a satellite that has tracked more than a billion stars throughout the Milky Way with incredible accuracy. “It is astounding to realise that we have another supermassive black hole<\/a> just down the block, cosmically speaking,” said Jesse Han from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), who led the study. “Black holes are so stealthy that this one has been practically under our noses this whole time.”<\/p>\n

This hidden black hole, estimated to be around 600,000 times the mass of The Sun<\/a>, was detected by analysing the trajectories of hypervelocity stars \u2013 stars travelling much faster than average.<\/p>\n

The LMC is destined to collide with our galaxy in approximately 2.4 billion years. When this collision occurs, the supermassive black hole in the LMC will migrate to the galactic centre and eventually merge with Sagittarius A*<\/a> – the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole. Astronomers believe that this is one way black holes grow from smaller sizes to even bigger ones.<\/p>\n

It was in 1971 that British astronomers predicted the existence of a black hole at the centre of our galaxy, which was discovered three years later. Then, in 2019, the first image of a supermassive black hole was captured. Today, they are a fundamental part of our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve.<\/p>\n

With a\u00a0declination of about -70\u00b0, the LMC is visible as a faint “cloud” from the\u00a0Southern Hemisphere\u00a0of the Earth and from as far north as 20\u00b0\u00a0N. It straddles the\u00a0constellations\u00a0Dorado\u00a0and\u00a0Mensa and has an apparent length of about 10\u00b0 to the naked eye – 20 times the Moon’s<\/a> diameter, from dark sites away from\u00a0light pollution.<\/p>\n

Like many\u00a0irregular galaxies – those that do not have a distinct regular shape like the Milky Way’s spiral – the LMC is rich in gas and dust and is currently undergoing vigorous star formation activity. Surveys of the galaxy have found roughly 60\u00a0globular clusters, 400\u00a0planetary nebulae\u00a0and 700\u00a0open clusters, along with hundreds of thousands of\u00a0giant\u00a0and\u00a0supergiant\u00a0stars.<\/p>\n

This comes as scientists saw inside a dying star during its explosive death<\/a> for the first time earlier this year, offering an unprecedented glimpse into how stars evolve. Stars can survive for millions to trillions of years before exhausting their fuel supply, with the largest ending their lives dramatically in a blast, known as a supernova.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A supermassive black hole residing within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – a satellite galaxy – is on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[203056,203057,203055,7021,203058,203054,203052,203053,60658,70,12288,413,7305,9947,52277,16,15],"class_list":["post-665334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-160000-light-years","tag-2-4-billion-years","tag-21-hypervelocity-stars","tag-black-hole","tag-collision-course","tag-gaia-mission","tag-large-magellanic-cloud","tag-milky-way-collision","tag-sagittarius-a","tag-science","tag-science-section","tag-space","tag-space-exploration","tag-supermassive-black-hole","tag-supernova","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}