Large sky Area Multi-Object fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) tagged posts

A surprisingly Big Black Hole might have Swallowed a Star from the Inside Out, and scientists are baffled

A recently discovered black hole – found by the way it makes a nearby star wobble – is hard to square with our understanding of how these dark cosmic objects form. Credit: NAOC, Chinese Academy of Sciences

About 15,000 light years away, in a distant spiral arm of the Milky Way, there is a black hole about 70 times as heavy as the Sun. The black hole seems too big to be the product of a single star collapsing, which poses questions for our theories of how black holes form.

Our team, led by Professor Jifeng Liu at the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dubbed the mysterious object LB-1.

Astronomers estimate that our galaxy alone contains about 100 million black holes, created when massive stars have collapsed over the past 13 billion years.

...Read More