The newly discovered black hole is roughly eleven times more massive than our Sun.
A team of astronomers has discovered a small black hole outside the Milky Way by detecting its influence on the movement of a nearby star thanks to the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
It is the first time that this detection method has been used, since the ESO facilities in Atacama (Chile) to reveal the presence of a black hole outside our galaxy, and ESO suggests that it could be used in the future to discover hidden black holes in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.
That would help shed light on how these mysterious objects form and evolve.
The newly discovered black hole was detected in NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars located about 160,000 light years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy of the Milky Way.
“We looked at each and every one of the stars in that cluster and, like Sherlock Holmes following the missteps of a criminal gang with his magnifying glass, we tried to find some evidence of the presence of black holes, although without seeing them directly.”
This was summarized by Sara Saracino, a researcher at the Astrophysical Research Institute of the John Moores University of Liverpool (United Kingdom) and director of this project, which will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, according to a statement from ESO.
“The result we show would represent only one of the wanted criminals, but when you have found one, you are well on your way to discovering many others in different clusters,” adds the scientist.
The newly discovered black hole is approximately eleven times more massive than our Sun, and it was its gravitational influence on the orbiting five-solar-mass star that caught the attention of the scientific team.
The astronomical community had previously detected such small “stellar mass” black holes in other galaxies by capturing the X-ray glow emitted when they swallow matter, or from the gravitational waves generated when black holes collide with each other or with neutron stars.
However, most stellar-mass black holes do not betray their presence through X-rays or gravitational waves.
“The presence of the vast majority can only be dynamically revealed,” says Stefan Dreizler, a member of the team based at the University of Göttingen (Germany).
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Dreizler explains that “when a black hole forms a system with a star, it will affect the motion of the star in a subtle but detectable way, so with sophisticated instruments, we will be able to find them.”
This dynamic method used by Saracino and his team could allow the astronomical community detect many more black holes and shed new light on how they work.
“Each detection we make will be important for our future understanding of star clusters and the black holes in them,” says study co-author Mark Gieles, from the University of Barcelona (Spain). (I)
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