A group of scientists, nicknamed the “black hole police,” has discovered a peculiar object that is completely invisible, hiding in the pitch-black space just outside the Milky Way galaxy, which contains Earth.
According to Daily Mail, although it is located outside the Milky Way galaxy, our planet is situated at the edge of the galaxy, so the mysterious black hole is only 160,000 light-years away – a vast distance for humanity, but relatively close for a black hole.
“Portrait” of the newly discovered black hole and its companion – (Photo: ESO)
This discovery is credited to a team of scientists from various leading research institutes, including the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), who used the Very Large Telescope located in Chile.
This black hole has a mass at least nine times that of our Sun and orbits a star like a disguised planet. It is currently in “hibernation”, meaning it is inactive and not consuming anything, making it completely invisible.
Black holes are extremely dense objects, and with that mass, it has a diameter of about 27 kilometers.
With this size, it is referred to as a “stellar black hole”, which means it is several to dozens of times more massive than typical stars. It formed from a massive star that completely collapsed.
The black hole realm also includes intermediate black holes, a type of object whose origins remain unknown; the most famous are supermassive black holes, also known as monster black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy.
The mysterious black hole and a star continuously orbiting each other – (Photo: ESO).
According to Science Alert, the region of space where the newly discovered black hole exists may belong to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, which has been suspected of colliding with Earth in a few billion years.
Black holes do not emit light, so scientists can only identify them through the light from the material they consume. This black hole is even harder to detect because it does not absorb light, rendering it completely invisible.
However, its companion – a star – has revealed the presence of this mysterious entity. The two objects orbit each other, and the behavior of orbiting something invisible indicated the existence of the black hole.
The research was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
