SEOUL, iNews.id – The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to find black hole previously unknown beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers find black holes by investigating how they affect nearby stars.
This discovery marks the first time a detection method has been used to find black holes outside galaxies. The black hole was found in a star cluster containing thousands of stars about 160,000 light years from Earth.
The cluster called NGC 1950 contains thousands of stars and resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor of the Milky Way galaxy. During the investigation, researchers observed each star in the cluster, looking for evidence of the existence of a black hole without being able to see the black hole directly, as quoted from Slash Gears.
Scientists believe because they have used the discovery to find black holes, the same technique can now be applied to find hidden black holes in other galaxies. The black hole the team discovered is about 11 times larger than the Sun, and is discovered by its gravitational influence on a star orbiting the black hole, which is about five times as massive as the sun.
Typical methods for finding black holes rely on detecting the x-rays they emit as they consume matter or the gravitational waves produced when black holes collide with each other or neutron stars.
However, the challenge in finding small stellar-mass black holes is that they don’t produce gravitational waves or x-rays. The research team says most black holes in this mass category are only dynamically discovered.
Researcher Stefan Dreizler said when black holes are stellar in mass or in systems with stars, the black hole affects the motion of the star in a detectable way, allowing small black holes to be found using sophisticated instruments.
Editor: Dini Listiyani
