Scientists discover what may be the 'missing link' in black hole evolution

Fresh on the heels of the discovery of a supermassive black hole, astronomers have located a medium-sized black hole in the NGC 2276 host galaxy, 100 million light years away.

The black hole is extremely rare, Discovery News reports, and it could be "the missing link in black hole evolution." NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Network found the black hole, thanks to radio waves "from energetic sources in the cosmos," Discovery News notes.

Intermediate-mass black holes are notoriously difficult to find, and the one in question, NGC-2276-3c, is extremely important to astronomers. The black hole has qualities representative of both stellar-sized black holes and supermassive black holes, Andrei Lobanov of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy told Discovery News, so it "helps tie the whole black hole family together."

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The astronomers are researching how NGC-2276-3c reached its host galaxy. They believe the black hole may have formed in a dwarf galaxy before merging with NGC 2276. Studying NGC-2276-3c could help scientists better understand black hole growth and how black holes become supermassive in their respective galaxies.