Capturing an image of a black hole is hard enough, so how do you detect one that’s dormant? An international team of scientists discovered a “dormant” black hole outside the Milky Way in a world first. Find out more at
An international team of scientists discovered a"dormant" black hole outside the Milky Way in a world first,The cosmic giant is nine times the mass of the Sun and orbits a hot, blue star weighing 25 times the Sun's mass.
A dormant black hole, also known as a stellar-mass black hole, is formed when massive stars reach the end of their lifetime and collapse under the force of their own gravity. In a binary star system, this process leaves behind a black hole with a luminous companion star. The black hole is classified as"dormant" when it does not emit high levels of X-ray radiation, which is how black holes are typically detected.
"It is incredible that we hardly know of any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe them to be," says co-author Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven. The problem arises from the lack of X-ray radiation, as well as the fact that dormant black holes don't interact much with their surroundings — making them very hard to spot.
The researchers also point out in their study that the star that turned into VFTS243 vanished without . This"direct-collapse scenario" has"enormous implications for the origin of black hole mergers in the cosmos," says study leadVFTS 243 after poring over six years of observations of the Tarantula Nebula by the fibre large array multi-element spectrograph instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. Those dormant black holes better watch out when the"black hole police" come patroling.
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