From the Daily Telegraph

Scientists discover strange form of black hole at the heart of Milky Way

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/04/scientists-discover-strange-form-ofblackhole-heart-milky-way/

Supermassive black holes lie at the heart of many – probably all – galaxies. There’s one in the core of the Milky Way. These weigh as much as 10 billion suns, however a cut down version, weighing in at a mere 100 thousand suns has been spotted. It could be a freak but scientists have actually been expecting something like this to crop up. This is a candidate for helping explain how both black holes as well as the Milky Way evolved.

The centre of the Milky Way, 27 000 light-years away from Earth CREDIT: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

From Nature Magazine

Check out the rocket science behind this in: Millimetre-wave emission from an intermediate-mass black hole candidate in the Milky Way

Figure 1 a, Colour map of HCN J = 3–2 emission integrated over V LSR = −110–0 km s−1. The white contours show the same map of HCN J = 4–3 emission obtained with the ASTE 10-m telescope4. The contour levels are 50, 100, 200 and 400 K km s−1. The half-power beam widths (HPBWs) of ASTE and ALMA are also presented by a white filled circle and black filled ellipse, respectively. Yellow arrows indicate the lines along which position-velocity slices are made (Fig. 2), and the white cross shows the location of CO–0.40–0.22*. b, Zoomed-in images of HCN J = 3–2 velocity-integrated emission (contours) and 266-GHz continuum emission (colour). The contour interval is 5 Jy beam−1 km s−1. The white filled ellipse shows the ALMA beamsize. Magenta dots show the loci of cloud particles in the gravitational kick model at t = 7.2 × 105 yr.

“a” Colour map of HCN J = 3–2 emission integrated over V LSR = −110–0 km s−1. The white contours show the same map of HCN J = 4–3 emission obtained with the ASTE 10-m telescope4. The contour levels are 50, 100, 200 and 400 K km s−1. The half-power beam widths (HPBWs) of ASTE and ALMA are also presented by a white filled circle and black filled ellipse, respectively. Yellow arrows indicate the lines along which position-velocity slices are made (Fig. 2), and the white cross shows the location of CO–0.40–0.22*.
“b” Zoomed-in images of HCN J = 3–2 velocity-integrated emission (contours) and 266-GHz continuum emission (colour). The contour interval is 5 Jy beam−1 km s−1. The white filled ellipse shows the ALMA beamsize. Magenta dots show the loci of cloud particles in the gravitational kick model at t = 7.2 × 105 yr.

I was kind of wondering where my socks and pens had gone.