Lurking Black hole

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Wade Hampton III
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Lurking Black hole

Post by Wade Hampton III » Sat Feb 11, 2017 8:01 pm

Our galaxy may harbour a plethora of quietly feeding black holes, with the discovery of a black hole gently grazing from a tiny star only 7,200 light-years from Earth. Astronomers examined what was thought to be a distant galaxy but realised it was an object well within the Milky Way. They suggested it's a black hole, a few times the mass of the sun, slowly pulling in material from companion star less than a fifth the size of the sun. The work, published in The Astrophysical Journal, calculates there may be up to 170 million such quiet pairings in the galaxy – some 1,000 times more than previous estimates. "If this is true, we'd like to know, because we might have to rethink some of the assumptions in our theoretical models of how these things form," says James Miller-Jones from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Australia and co-author of the paper. Discovered around 20 years ago, VLA J2130+12 was pegged as a galaxy hundreds of thousands of light-years beyond Messier 15, a group of stars in the Milky Way around 33,000 light-years from Earth.
Don't Come Here!
Don't Come Here!
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https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/stealt ... -milky-way

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