For The First Time, ‘Blackhole Police’ Find a Dormant Hole In Our Galaxy

Although this type of black hole is thought to be a fairly common cosmic phenomenon according to the European and US researchers who participated in the study.

The black hole recently detected, VFTS 243 is at least ninety times larger than our sun. It orbits a hot blue star weighing 25x the sun’s weight, making it part of a binary system.

Pablo Marchant, an astronomer from KU Leuven in Belgium, said in a news release that “it is amazing that we hardly know about any dormant Black holes, given how common astronomers believe they to be.”

The research was published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy Monday.

The elimination process

The black hole can’t be seen directly so the astronomers studied 1,000 massive stars (each at least eight times as large as the sun) in Tarantula Nebula, a galaxy close to the Milky Way.

Tomer Shenar was a coauthor and was at KU Leuven in Belgium at the time of the study. He is now a Marie Curie Fellow at Amsterdam University in the Netherlands.

The researchers first identified stars that were part of binary systems, which are stars moving around a cosmic partner. They then looked for binary systems without a companion and careful analysis revealed that VFTS 243 is a dormant dark hole. He explained this via email.

Six years of observations were made by the Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrographs (FLAMES) instrument, which is part of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The black hole was discovered. FLAMES allows astronomers more than 100 objects simultaneously.

Black hole police

According to the news release about the 40 study authors, they are often called the black hole police because they have proven several other black hole discoveries false.

According to the paper, more than 10 black hole binary system discoveries in the last two years were disputed. They were however confident that the discovery of black hole binary systems was not a false alarm.