A team of international experts known as the “Black Hole Police” has discovered a stellar-mass sleeping black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The Magellanic Cloud is a neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way.
The research team included a researcher of Egyptian origins, Karim El-Badry, from the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University in the United States, whom astronomers called the “black hole destroyer.”
“For the first time, our team has come together to report on the discovery of a black hole, rather than reject it,” says study leader Tomer Shinar from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
The team found that the star that gave rise to the black hole had disappeared without any sign of a powerful explosion.
“We identified a needle in a haystack,” says Schnarer. Although other similar candidate black holes have been proposed, the team claims this is the first stellar-mass “sleeping” black hole to be unambiguously discovered outside the Milky Way. Today in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Stellar-mass black holes form when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under the influence of their own gravity.
In a binary system, a system of two stars orbiting each other, this process leaves a black hole in orbit with a bright companion star.
A black hole is “sleeping” if it does not emit high levels of X-ray radiation, which is how such black holes are usually detected.
The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT).
“It’s incredible that we hardly know any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe they are,” says co-author Pablo Marchant.
The newly discovered black hole is at least nine times the mass of the Sun, and orbits a hot blue star that weighs 25 times the mass of the Sun.