According to the Daily Mail, although it is outside the galaxy containing the Earth Milky Way (the Milky Way), but because our planet is located at the edge of the galaxy, the mysterious black hole is only 160,000 light years away – a huge distance. Humans are small, but for a black hole, it’s too close.
“Portrait” of the newly discovered black hole and its companion – Photo: ESO
The discovery is the work of a team of scientists from many famous institutes and schools for astronomical research such as the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics – USA and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), using the Very Telescope. Large located in Chile,
This black hole is at least 9 times the mass of our Sun, orbiting a star like a planet in disguise. It is “hibernating”, that is, stops working, stops eating, so it is completely invisible.
Black holes are inherently a super dense object, so with that mass, it is only about 27 km in diameter.
With that size, it is called a “stellar-mass black hole”, which is only a few times to several tens of times larger than stars in terms of mass. It formed from a massive star that had completely collapsed.
The black hole world also has medium-sized black holes, a type of object that has come from nowhere; The most famous is the supermassive black hole, also known as the monster black hole, like the one that is at the center of our galaxy.
Mysterious black hole and a star constantly orbiting each other – Photo: ESO
According to Science Alert, the region of space in which the newly discovered black hole exists may belong to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, once suspected of crashing into Earth and colliding in a few billion years. again.
The black hole is not luminous, so scientists can only identify it through the light from the matter it swallows. This black hole is even more difficult to detect because it does not swallow light, so it is completely invisible.
But its companion – a star – has revealed the whereabouts of the mysterious. The two objects orbit each other, and it is the behavior of orbiting something invisible that indicates the black hole.
The study has just been published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
