While there is photographic evidence of a black hole, it doesn’t necessarily mean astronomers understand how they work.
Chinese-led researchers have recently found a black hole, LB-1 and lives 15,000 light-years away in the Milky Way with a mass so huge, that it breaks current stellar evolution models.
In lamens terms: it has a mass 70 times greater than that of the sun.
Scientists are currently scratching their heads at what exactly made something this large, possible.
The team used LAMOST, or China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, to discover starts orbiting objects that are seemingly invisible. The technique had originally been proposed back in 1783 but has not been possible until recently.
Then, they used both the US’ Keck I telescope along with Spain’s Gran Telescopio Canarias to find the properties of both the star (in a tight, 79-day orbit) and along with the massive black hole.
In the past, detection methods such as looking for holes eating gas from a star would make sighting rare.
All that said, let’s just hope black holes continue to be far away and pretty from a grand distance!