VFTS 243 Dormant Stellar Mass Black Hole Large Magellanic Cloud
An international team of experts have stumbled upon VFTS 243, a dorman stellar-mass black hole located 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud. These stellar-mass black holes are formed when gigantic stars reach the end of their lifecycle and collapse under their own gravity. This process leaves behind a black hole in orbit with a luminous companion star in a binary system.



The leftover black hole is considered ‘dormant’ if it doesn’t emit high levels of X-ray radiation, which is also how they are typically detected. This particular stellar-mass black hole is at least nine times the mass of our Sun, and orbits a hot, blue star weighing twenty-five times the Sun’s mass. In other news, astrophysicists have detected light behind a black hole, thus confirming Albert Einstein’s theory.

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The star that formed the black hole in VFTS 243 appears to have collapsed entirely, with no sign of a previous explosion. Evidence for this ‘direct-collapse’ scenario has been emerging recently, but our study arguably provides one of the most direct indications. This has enormous implications for the origin of black-hole mergers in the cosmos,” said Tomer Shenar, study leader.

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