Thursday, January 28, 2010

New blackhole 20 times bigger than Sun discovered by VLT

A distance record-breaking black hole was discovered by astronomers from Very Large Telescope - Chile, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced on Thursday. The stellar-mass black hole is located at 6 million lights years from Earth in the NCG300 Galaxy and with a mass of about 20-times that of our Sun, makes it the second biggest stellar-mass blackhole ever found. In our galaxy (Milky Way) the black holes do not exceed 10 times the size of the Sun and only three out of twenty discovered in Univers so far are 15 times larger than the Sun. The newest seen blackhole is categorized as stellar-mass black hole because it originates from a collapsing star which exhausted its energy. The spiral NGC300 backhole has also an interesting partner which is a Wolf-Rayet star. Wolf-Rayet stars are almost at the end of their lives and escape energy into the surroundings prior to blasting as supernovae with their core imploding to blackholes. In the present discovery the Wolf-Rayet star is stripped of its matter by the blackhole. The scientists expect the two blackhole to merge together

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