(HIGH) On November 11, CNN reported that a newly discovered black hole was “hiding” in a cluster of thousands of stars in the galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud nearby our galaxy.
According to Wikipedia, a black hole or black hole is a region of space-time where the gravitational field is so strong that nothing neither matter particles nor electromagnetic radiation such as light can escape it.
This black hole is located 160,000 light-years from Earth and has a mass 11 times that of our Sun.
Astronomers found it using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large telescope in Chile to observe how the black hole’s gravity affects the motion of a nearby, massive star 5 times more than our Sun.
This is the first time this way of detecting black holes has been used, and it could help researchers discover other hidden black holes in our own Milky Way and other galaxies.
The more we learn about black holes, the more astronomers can better understand how these cosmic objects form and change over time.
“Just as Sherlock Holmes watches a gang of criminals from their missteps, we are looking at each of the stars in this cluster to try to find some evidence of the presence of black holes. but not seeing them directly,” said Sara Saracino, lead researcher and member of the faculty of engineering and technology from John Moores University’s Liverpool Institute for Astrophysics.While black holes are difficult to detect, they tend to eliminate an invisible presence with their actions. Black holes emit X-rays when they swallow matter around them, or create gravitational waves when they crash into each other or collide with dense neutron stars.
But all black holes are not created equal, and this one is smaller than some of the others that astronomers have discovered.
The researchers noticed that only when they saw a star with a strange motion among many other stars that did not behave in the same way.
This is the first time astronomers have found a young black hole in a cluster this relatively young – about 100 million years old, which is in its infancy when compared to the rest of the universe.
In the future, astronomers can use this method to find other young black holes to understand their evolution and compare them with the larger black holes in older star clusters to see the stars. How black holes grow over time.
Mark Gieles, study co-author and research professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain, said: “Each finding that we make will be important for the future understanding of us about star clusters and the black holes in them.”
