WASHINGTON, Sept 18: The orbiting Hubble space telescope has detected a new type of black hole that provides another key to one of the universe’s great mysteries, astronomers said.

The new category, which falls between the small “stellar mass” black holes and the enormous light-and-matter-gobbling “galactic-center” black holes, will provide new data on how the mysterious phenomena are formed, said Michael Rich of the University of California, Los Angeles.

“These new data from Hubble ... provide information on one of the most important unsolved problems in astronomy today,” he told an astronomy forum at NASA headquarters here Tuesday.

Black holes, some of them billions of years old, are concentrations of matter so dense their gravity sucks in and retains anything within grasp, even light.

The discovery of a third category of black hole “may be telling us something very deep about the formation of star clusters and black holes in the early universe,” said Roeland Van Der Marel of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.

In fact, “Black holes are even more common in the universe than previously thought,” he said.

Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin said the newly-discovered intermediate class “may be the building blocks of the supermassive black holes that dwell in the centers of most galaxies.”

The intermediate class of black holes was discovered by Hubble amid stellar constellations situated around the Milky Way, the galaxy of which the Earth and Solar System are a part.—AFP