Finding a needle in a haystack! New discoveries in the universe

A research team composed of American and European astronomers announced on the 18th that they had discovered a dormant stellar-mass black hole for the first time in a galaxy adjacent to the Milky Way.

Finding a needle in a haystack

The researchers wrote in the British journal Nature Astronomy published on the same day that this dormant black hole was named VFTS 243, located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, has a mass at least nine times that of the sun, and is about 160,000 light-years away from the Earth.

Researchers say that finding a dormant black hole in the vast universe is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

A black hole is a celestial body with a very small size and extremely high mass. It is like a cosmic "swallowing mouth" from which even light cannot escape and cannot be directly observed. Previous studies have shown that dormant black holes are widespread in the universe, but they are difficult to detect because they do not emit high-intensity X-rays like many other black holes.

According to CNN, astronomers spent six years observing 1,000 massive stars with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and found that a star with a mass about 25 times that of the sun orbits an "invisible" celestial body, which takes about 10 days to orbit. The analysis results show that the "invisible" celestial body is the dormant black hole VFTS 243.

Astronomers released the first photo of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way on May 12

Image source: Xinhua News Agency (Photo courtesy of Event Horizon Telescope)

Clearly

According to Reuters, the dormant black hole was formed by the death of a star 20 times more massive than our sun.

The researchers said that there has never been a "clear and unequivocal" discovery of a dormant black hole outside the Milky Way before. CNN quoted the research content as reporting that more than a dozen discoveries of black hole binary systems have been questioned in the past two years, but the astronomers involved in this study said that they ruled out all other possibilities and determined that the "invisible" object was a black hole.

Tomer Scheiner, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and the lead author of the study, said that while the research could not be said to be foolproof, none of the scholars involved in the study found any "flaws" in the research. He welcomed the peer review of the findings.

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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