naoc

Latest

  • Yu Jingchuan, Beijing Planetarium

    Astronomers find stellar black hole so large it shouldn't exist

    by 
    Jon Fingas
    Jon Fingas
    12.01.2019

    Just because there's a picture of a black hole doesn't mean astronomers have figured out how they work. Chinese-led researchers have detected a stellar black hole in the Milky Way with a mass so large that it breaks current stellar evolution models. LB-1, a black hole 15,000 light-years away, has a mass 70 times greater than that of the Sun -- previous estimates suggested that no stellar black hole would have more than 20 times the Sun's mass. Scientists expected many dying stars to shed most of their gas, making something this large impossible without readjusting theories.