A group of international astronomers in the UK, France and the USA, led by the University of Leicester, have found proof to confirm the distance and brightness of the most extreme ultra-luminous X-ray source, which may herald a new type of Black Hole. The X-ray source, HLX-1, is the most extreme member of an extraordinary class of objects -- the ultra-luminous X-ray sources -- located at a distance of ~300 million light years from the Earth.
This is forcing scientists to rethink their theories on the maximum brightness of ultra-luminous X-ray sources, and provides support to the idea that HLX-1 may contain an intermediate mass black hole. While astrophysicists have suspected that an intermediate class of black hole might exist, with masses between a hundred and several hundred thousand times that of the Sun, such black holes had not previously been reliably detected and their existence has been fiercely debated among the astronomical community.
This is forcing scientists to rethink their theories on the maximum brightness of ultra-luminous X-ray sources, and provides support to the idea that HLX-1 may contain an intermediate mass black hole. While astrophysicists have suspected that an intermediate class of black hole might exist, with masses between a hundred and several hundred thousand times that of the Sun, such black holes had not previously been reliably detected and their existence has been fiercely debated among the astronomical community.
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