Usually a team of researchers gathered to debunk the alleged findings of interstellar black holes, and recently they made a surprising discovery – they claim to have discovered the first black hole discovered outside the Milky Way. According to a new study published Monday, Tomer Shenar and a team of scientists used data captured at the European Southern Observatory to make the discovery.
“For the first time, our team has come together to report on the discovery of a black hole, rather than reject it,” Schnarer said in a statement from ESO. We identified a ‘needle in a haystack’.
While other sleeper black holes have been proposed by other scientists, this study claims that the recently discovered black hole (found in the Large Magellanic Cloud), is the first black hole “unequivocally discovered” outside our galaxy.
Named VFTS 243, the researchers searched nearly 1,000 beginnings within the Tarantula Nebula of the cosmic cloud, hoping to discover plugging nearby holes.
“The star that formed the black hole in VFTS 243 appears to have collapsed completely, with no sign of an earlier explosion,” Schnarer continued. “Evidence for this ‘direct collapse’ scenario has emerged recently, but arguably our study provides one of the most direct indications. This has huge implications for the origin of black hole mergers in the universe.”
In all, it took six years of observations to come to the conclusion, using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).
Before acknowledging the discoveries, study co-author Karim El-Badri added that his team should be open to criticism from other studies and researchers. “Of course I expect others in the field to carefully scrutinize our analysis, and try to develop alternative models. It’s a very exciting project to be involved in.”
The group’s full research paper can be read on the ESO website here.
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