Astronomers have recently made an exciting discovery: they found a black hole, a big one, in the Milky Way, that was not supposed to be there – it challenges the initial beliefs about the evolution of stars.
The black hole has been named LB-1 and is 15.000 light-years from Earth, and its mass is 70 times greater than the Sun, as per some sources. Liu Jifeng, from the National Astronomical Observatory of China, was the one to lead the research. In this research, LB-1 is twice the size of any black hole found in the Milky Way. You need to keep in mind that there are about 100 million.
Scientists found what they believe to be the first photo of a black hole back in April. Liu Jifeng explained that black holes that have this kind of mass should not exist in our galaxy, as per the so many models of stellar evolution. Theorists now want to take up the challenge of finding out how did it form.
David Reitze is a physicist from the California Institute of Technology, and he was not involved in the research. However, he stated that astronomers just started to find out how many black holes are in the galaxy, and their process of formation.
The large mass of LB-1 is known to be in the category of the ‘pair-instability gap,’ and supernovas should not have produced it. This actually means that there is a new kind of black hole there, which had an entirely different physical mechanism.
As stated before, last April, scientists found the first-ever picture of a black hole, which was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).this is an international project that connected dozens of observatories in order to capture the first-ever image of a black hole. They did it by creating a ‘virtual Earth-sized telescope.’
