The European Southern Observatory’s own Very Large Telescope recently identified a previously unknown form of a black hole in a nearby galaxy for the very first time.
Unlike active black holes, inactive stellar-mass black holes are very difficult to detect because they do not have contact with their environment. Since inactive black holes don’t produce a lot of X-ray light, this is why they aren’t visible to the naked eye.
An international group of experts from the United States and Europe found a new sort of black hole that has not before been “unambiguously discovered beyond our galaxy,” despite this kind of black hole being considered a frequent cosmic event.
The recently identified black hole, known as VFTS 243, has a minimum nine times the weight of the Sun and also is inside of a binary system with a bright, blue star 25-fold the Sun’s weight.
There are 1,000 enormous stars in the Tarantula Nebula (each at minimum 8x the mass of our Sun) that scientists examined at in order to detect a black hole that cannot be viewed normally.
What we observe is a massive star orbiting something ‘undetectable,’ which we cannot discern from the data on a regular basis (approximately every 10 days). According to our calculations, the ‘object’ in question must be at least nine times as large as the Sun. The most important component of the investigation is the process of exclusion: what is nine times as massive as the Sun yet produces no light? We’re left with just one option: a black hole.
The study stated that more than ten black hole binary configurations have been challenged in the preceding two years. As long as they didn’t find anything else, they were certain of their discoveries.
