Scientists discover a mysterious ‘Sleeping’ black hole in the galaxy next door

tech.hindustantimes.com:

A Black Hole is a massive mystery and an object to be feared. These aspects have always kept humanity intrigued. A black hole is that mysterious region in space where gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape and everything around is gobbled up by it. Because everything has been squeezed into such a small space, gravity is incredibly strong and that keeps anything from escaping from a black hole. But finding these black holes in space is not that easy and must be surmised from the behaviour of galaxies and stars near them. However, now scientists have managed to find a black hole that should be extremely common but it is actually quite rare- a dormant black hole. This means that it is not feeding on other objects around it.

This kind of dormant black hole, Stellar-mass black hole, is rare and challenging for astronomers to discover just because of the fact that these objects are not actively foraging on matter like gas, dust or stellar material stripped from a companion stars. When they feed of their surrounding matter, x-rays are generated that help astronomers locate them. If they don't, locating them is difficult.

However, a team of international experts have discovered this stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a neighbour galaxy to our own. “We identified a ‘needle in a haystack',” says Tomer Shenar who is an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and is the lead author of the new study on black holes. This new black hole has been named VFTS 243.

This is the first confirmed detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole outside the Milky Way and that too despite the expectations that billions of dormant black holes exist in virtually every galaxy.