For The First Time, A Hard-To-Detect Dormant Black Hole Was Found By Scientists
Scientists have discovered a black hole that is unlike anything discovered before. The black hole is dormant, and the star that formed it appears to have disappeared, scientists say.
Data shows a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way's neighbouring galaxy. The star that created this black hole has vanished without a giant explosion.
While this is not unusual, for not all stars produce an explosion before slipping into a black hole situation, this is the first time scientists have found a dormant, stellar-mass black hole. Stellar-mass black holes have lower masses (3-10 solar masses) than supermassive black holes (millions-billions of solar masses) that exist in the centre of galaxies.
Finding a dormant black hole
The team behind the discovery of this black hole is nicknamed "black hole police" or "black hole destroyers" because they're notorious for fact-checking previous black hole findings.
"For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one," Tomer Shenar from Amsterdam University, the study's lead author, said in a statement.
The black hole was described by its finders as a "needle in a haystack," for dormant black holes may be common in the universe, we know very little about them. Why is that, you wonder?
Also read:?Fastest Star Known To Mankind Found Orbiting Milky Way's Black Hole At 8,000 Km/s
Dormant black holes do not interact with other objects in their surroundings, which is why they're hard to spot. To find this particular black hole, researchers observers 1,000 massive stars in the Turantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Over time, they found VFTS 243 - a dormant black hole, waiting to be observed by humanity. The findings were published in Nature Astronomy in a paper titled "An X-ray quiet black hole born with a negligible kick in a massive binary within the LMC."
Also read:?Fastest-Growing Black Hole Ever Is Eating One Earth's Equivalent Each Second
What do you think about this mind-blowing discovery? Let us know in the comments below.?For?more in the world of?technology?and?science, keep reading?Indiatimes.com.
References
Griffin, A. (2022, July 18). Scientists find black hole unlike any other discovered before. The Independent.?
