date of publication:
July 18 2022 19:25 GMT
Update date: July 18 2022 19:50 GMT
Astronomers have discovered a dormant black hole 160,000 light-years from Earth.
A team of specialized researchers verified the hole, which is about nine times the mass of the Sun, and orbits a star.
And they searched about 1,000 stars in the “Spider Nebula” region in the Large Magellanic Galaxy, before locating it, according to the British newspaper, “Daily Mail”.
According to the newspaper, although some black holes have been discovered before, the team said that this is the first static stellar-mass black hole to be found with certainty outside the Milky Way.
Scientists described this discovery as finding a “needle in a haystack,” where static black holes are difficult to detect; Because it does not interact with its surroundings.
Project leader Dr. Tomer Shnar said that “for the first time, our team gathered to report the discovery of a black hole, rather than deny it, and that the team discovered that the star that caused the black hole to appear had disappeared without any trace of a massive explosion.”
Co-author Dr. Pablo Marchant of the University of Louvain in Belgium added: “It’s incredible. Due to the difficulty of detecting dormant black holes.”
The hole was spotted after six years of observations using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) VLT telescope.
The newly discovered black hole is located in the Large Magellanic Galaxy, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and the Magellanic Galaxy orbits around a hot blue star three times the size of the Milky Way.
It is noteworthy that stellar-mass black holes are formed at the end of the life of massive stars and then collapse under the influence of their gravity, and if the black hole does not emit high levels of X-rays, it is said to be “sleeping” or dormant.
Astronomers believe that there are thousands of stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way and Magellan.