Recently, scientists have found a black hole that’s so big that even theories can’t explain it. A Chinese-led team has found a stellar-mass black hole that is 68 times bigger than Earth’s sun.
Reports says that the Milky Way galaxy’s stellar-mass black holes that forms after the violent deaths of giant stars top out at only 25 times the mass of the sun. Also, the huge black hole is relatively close to Earth in cosmic terms. According to reports, monster black hole sits at 13,800 light-years from our planet.
Jifeng Liu, Deputy director-general of the National Astronomical Observatories of China at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement “Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution.”
Further she added, “We thought that very massive stars with the chemical composition typical of our galaxy must shed most of their gas in powerful stellar winds, as they approach the end of their life. Therefore, they should not leave behind such a massive remnant. Now, theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation.”
With the help of the China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), Liu’s team found out that the black hole using gravitational observations.
Academy Representatives in a statement said, “The discovery of LB-1 fits nicely with another breakthrough in astrophysics. Recently, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors have begun to catch ripples in space-time caused by collisions of black holes in distant galaxies. Intriguingly, the black holes involved in such collisions are also much bigger than what was previously considered typical.”
According to reports, the researchers have acknowledged some warnings with the study. Europe’s Gaia space telescope that precisely measures the movements of a billion stars, has recommended that the distance to this black hole might only be about 7,000 light-years, or may be just half the distance the Chinese team calculated. And if it true, then the black hole would only be 10 times the mass of the sun.
