Black Holes are formed when stars die. But, there is a limit that a black hole can have. A team of Chinese scientists came across something that has put all the scientist across the globe into re-evaluating their theories and have put their knowledge to a huge test.
The Black Hole is so huge that it should not, theoretically exist. The new Black Hole is located around 15000 light-years away from the Earth. What makes it a huge or monster black hole is the fact that it is 70 times larger than the mass of the Sun! The detailed report of the black hole has been published in the latest issue of Nature.
Ideally, no black hole can be larger than 20 times that mass of our sun. This is because when the stars explode and die, they lose a lot of their mass which is swept away by the winds. That was what scientists believed so far.
The new Black Hole, LB-1, has toppled all the theories that the scientists in particular and the general public in general believed. “Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” says Liu Jifeng who is the head of the team that discovered the Black Hole. He is also a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of China.
Of course, there has been a history of massive and stellar black holes in the past. There are a few massive black holes that have been observed at the centre of many galaxies. They have been found to be of a heavy size as well. However, the LB-1 is truly of an unprecedented size ever.
Scientists have now been checking out different possibilities on why the Black Hole has attained such a supermassive size. There are several theories being put forth. It is assumed that the Black Hole may not have been caused by just one star. It is assumed that it may be because of two stars or more. Another theory that scientists have been putting ahead is that it may be two Black Holes orbiting each other.
It should be noticed that our Milky Way galaxy has over 100 million stellar black holes. However, the scientists have been capable of identifying only around 20 to 25 of them so far. The use of advanced technologies opted for in finding the newly discovered LB-1 black hole can perhaps lead the way for achieving better standards and better discoveries in the days to come.
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