{"id":25235,"date":"2022-07-18T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T15:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=25235"},"modified":"2022-07-17T15:12:09","modified_gmt":"2022-07-17T19:12:09","slug":"eso-dormant-black-hole-discovered-outside-our-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=25235","title":{"rendered":"ESO: Dormant black hole discovered outside our galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new paper from the European Southern Observatory (ESO)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

‘Black hole police’ discover a dormant black hole outside our galaxy<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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This artist\u2019s impression shows what the binary system VFTS 243 might look like if we were observing it up close. The system, which is located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is composed of a hot, blue star with 25 times the Sun\u2019s mass and a black hole, which is at least nine times the mass of the Sun. The sizes of the two binary components are not to scale: in reality, the blue star is about 200 000 times larger than the black hole.\u00a0 Note that the ‘lensing’ effect around the black hole is shown for illustration purposes only, to make this dark object more noticeable in the image. The inclination of the system means that, when looking at it from Earth, we cannot observe the black hole eclipsing the star.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own.<\/p>\n

“For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,”<\/em><\/p>\n

says study leader Tomer Shenar. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory\u2019s (ESO\u2019s) Very Large Telescope (VLT).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe identified a \u2018needle in a haystack\u2019<\/em>,\u201d<\/p>\n

says Shenar who started the study at KU Leuven in Belgium [1]<\/a> and is now a Marie-Curie Fellow at Amsterdam University, the Netherlands. Though other similar black hole candidates have been<\/a> proposed, the team claims this is the first \u2018dormant\u2019 stellar-mass black hole to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy.<\/p>\n