Earlier this year scientists snapped the first-ever real image of a black hole which won a $3 million The Breakthrough prize but astronomers are still unknown how they work. Chinese-led researchers have discovered a black hole named LB-1 about 15,000 light-years far in the milky way galaxy with mass 70 times greater than that of the sun.
The researchers used the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) in China to find stars orbiting objects, later the researchers used the United States’ Keck I telescope and Spain’s Gran Telescopio Canarias to calculate and analyze the properties of both the star (in a tight, 79-day orbit) and its companion black hole.
The findings were published by Chinese researchers in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
“Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” said Liu Jifeng, head of the team that made the discovery. “LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation.”
According to NASA, stellar black hole LB-1 is not the largest black hole discovered yet, but it’s the largest of it’s kind. The supermassive black holes are billion times larger than the sun in mass.