‘Impossible’ black hole found in the Milky Way is so big science says it shouldn’t exist
AN "impossible" black hole discovered in the Milky Way has stunned astronomers - as the laws of physics say it is too big to exist.
The mystery giant has a mass around 68 times greater than the sun and lurks within our galaxy some 13,800 light years away in the constellation Gemini.
Chinese scientists found it by studying x-rays from a young blue star dubbed LB-1, showing it spins away and towards us at great speed.
Further observations showed it is being whipped around by the gravity of a giant unseen mass.
That could only be a black hole - the dense core of a collapsed star where gravity is so strong even light can't escape.
But the discovery blows apart the current theory of how such black holes are formed in an explosion called a pair instability supernova.
The process should produce objects with a maximum mass around 20 times that of our sun.
Prof Liu Jifeng, who led the research at the National Astronomical Observatory of China, said the new black hole is twice as massive as anything scientists thought possible.
He said: "Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution."
The research, , will force scientists to find new theories to explain how the LB-1 object could have formed.
Michael Zevin, of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, : “I never thought in my wildest dreams you could form a black hole this big [in the Milky Way].
“If the observations pan out to be correct, this is really going to have people scratching their heads.”
So-called stellar-mass black holes are thought to form after a supernova, when a giant star explodes at the end of its life.
They eject most of their mass, limiting the size of the resulting black hole when the core collapses.
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However the new black hole near LB-1 is roughly the same mass as some objects spotted in far-away galaxies by gravitational wave detectors.
Astronomers say they could be created by another mechanism.
Supermassive black holes are a different species, although scientists are not sure how they originate.
The one at the centre of the Milky Way has a mass around four million times greater than the sun.