![]() Gravity crushes the star’s core and it collapses in on itself, forming a gravitational field so strong that not even light can escape. Roaming black holes form when huge stars-ones at least 20 times larger than the sun-explode. “This includes both lower mass black holes and possibly even a neutron star.” “As much as we would like to say it is definitively a black hole, we must report all allowed solutions,” Jessica Lu of the Berkeley team says in the statement. But the Baltimore team estimated the object’s mass is seven solar masses (one solar mass is the weight of our sun), which means it’s a black hole, per a NASA statement. The Berkeley team’s results, between 1.6 and 4.4 solar masses, were more ambiguous, perhaps pointing to the discovery of a neutron star instead. Two teams- one from the University of California, Berkeley and another from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore-analyzed the Hubble data and both found a compact object. “Then, assuming black holes follow similar distribution as stars, one expects, statistically, that the nearest black hole may be about 80 light years away.”īut the mysterious object may not be a black hole at all. ![]() “Our discovery of a black hole is consistent with the theoretical calculations which suggest that there should be about 100 million black holes in our Galaxy,” Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, tells Newsweek’s Ed Browne. ![]() Astronomers estimate it lies about 5,000 light years away and is traveling between 67,000 and 100,000 miles per hour, writes CNN’s Ashley Strickland. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has, for the first time, identified what might be an isolated black hole roaming through the Milky Way galaxy, zipping around like it was shot from a cannon. ![]()
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