Astronomers have spotted in a galaxy adjacent to our Milky Way what they are calling a cosmic 'needle in a haystack' - a black hole that not only is classified as dormant but appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star.
An artist’s impression showing what the binary star system VFTS 243 – containing a black hole and a large luminous star orbiting each other - might look like if we were observing it up close is seen in this undated handout image. The system, which is located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, is composed of a hot, blue star with 25 times the sun’s mass and a black hole, which is at least nine times the mass of the sun. ESO/L.
Dormant black holes, thought to be relatively common, are hard to detect because they interact very little with their surroundings. Numerous prior proposed candidates have been debunked with further study, including by members of the team that uncovered this one. There are different categories of black holes. The smallest, like the newly detected one, are so-called stellar-mass black holes formed by the collapse of massive individual stars at the ends of their life cycles. There also are intermediate-mass black holes as well as the enormous supermassive black holes residing at the center of most galaxies.
Had a supernova occurred, the blast's force would have kicked the newly formed black hole in a random direction and yielded an elliptical rather than circular orbit, Shenar added.
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