Kareem El-Badry
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Kareem El-Badry
@kelbadry.bsky.social
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Astronomer @Caltech.edu, studying binary stars and black holes
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Reposted by Kareem El-Badry
emily.space
A very fascinating paper went up on the arXiv today!

Jesse Han & El-Badry et al. reanalysed the 21 known 'hypervelocity' stars in the #milkyway.

They find strong evidence that the LMC (Large Milky/Magellanic Cloud) has a supermassive black hole at its core! 🤯 arxiv.org/abs/2502.00102
A figure from the paper (Figure 4). It shows the locations of known hypervelocity stars as black circles, with the predicted overdensity that the LMC would cause shown in red. Full caption: Predicted on-sky overdensity of hypervelocity stars originating from a 6 × 105M⊙ supermassive black hole in the LMC. The black open circles denote the Galactic coordinates of hypervelocity stars detected in the HVS Survey, while the grey-shaded regions mark areas excluded from the survey. The current position of the LMC is illustrated with a representative image, and its orbital trajectory is drawn with a red arrow. The forward model incorporating an SMBH in the LMC along with the selection effects of the HVS Survey predicts a prominent overdensity of HVS in the region enclosed by the red contours. The overdensity arises because stars are boosted in the direction of the LMC’s orbit. This model accurately reproduces the observed overdensity location, supporting the hypothesis of an SMBH in the LMC as a source of these stars.
February 4, 2025 at 8:56 AM