Black Hole Police discovers the first dormant Stellar-Mass black hole outside Milky Way
For the first time ever, a dormant stellar-mass black hole has been discovered outside of the Milky Way galaxy. And who discovered it? The black hole police. Yes, a team of astronomers who are known for exposing fake black hole discoveries called the black hole police have been accredited with this discovery. Interestingly, the galaxy where this stellar-mass black hole has been found is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud. The satellite galaxy is a smaller companion galaxy that travels along with the host galaxy in fixed orbit.
The discovery and the discoverer are both noteworthy. The black hole police is a group of young astronomers who have gained notoriety for being skeptic about increasing black hole discoveries and spend time disproving the false claims. And after years of exposing others, the group has made its first discovery. And the discovery has made its way to the pages of history. The team has published their paper documenting the first ever dormant stellar-mass black hole outside the Milky Way in Nature Astronomy, a peer-reviewed journal.
The black hole, named VFTS 243, is dormant according to these astronomers. A dormant black hole does not emit high levels of X-ray radiation like the active black holes, which also makes spotting them more difficult. According to an Earth Sky report, the researchers were able to find this black hole after spending countless hours going through 1,000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
“We identified a “needle in a haystack”. For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” Tomer Shenar, the lead author on the paper said.
VFTS 243 is also a
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