The team behind the discovery have been nicknamed the ‘black hole police’
Scientists have discovered a stellar-mass black hole that they say is unlike any other found before.
Researchers say they have found a dormant black hole at least nine times the mass of our Sun just 160,000 light years from Earth, the first time outside our galaxy.
The sleeping giant is not currently devouring gas or other matter.
The star that gave rise to it vanished – without any sign of a powerful explosion.
Lead author Dr Tomer Shenar, of Amsterdam University, said: “We identified a ‘needle in a haystack’.”
Not now black hole unlike any other discovered before… https://t.co/Mpg1wM9IwW
— John Sweeney (@johnsweeneyroar) July 18, 2022
The international team searched nearly 1,000 massive stars in the spectacular Tarantula Nebula in the constellation of Dorado.
The discovery is remarkable in part because the team behind it have been nicknamed the “black hole police” or “black hole destroyers” as a result of their previous work in showing that other black hole discoveries were actually mistaken.
“For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” said Shenar in a statement.
Identification of VFTS 243 was made thanks to six years of data obtained with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).
The FLAMES (Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph) scanner allows more than a hundred objects to be observed at once – a significant saving of time.
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