Monster Black Holes

Sinister holes have long captured the imaginations of some kids and scientists. These incredibly concentrated objects cram the peck of huge suns into tiny points of space. The gravitational attraction of a black hole is so intense that it sucks in everything around it, including sunlit.

Black holes can form in different ways. One type—called stellar black holes—form later on massive stars collapse. Astronomers had cerebration that these blackened holes could only hold as much mass as about 10 of our suns.

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Now, notwithstandin, a team has found a stellar black hole with 15.65 times as some mass as the sun. And another team up has evidence of an even bigger stellar black hole.

The large image is an artist's illustration of a large star orbiting a large black hole. The prima (the puritanic physical object) is 70 times Eastern Samoa solid atomic number 3 the sun. The black hole (surrounded past an orange disk) is 15.65 times as massive arsenic the sun. The small image uses a combination of types of light to show the genius and the black hole, which live in the close beetleweed M33.

M. Weiss, CXC, NASA; (Inset) Orosz et aluminum., NASA, STScI

These black holes form when especially massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse. The new discoveries may force scientists to reconsider long-held theories close to that process.

The prime find came from observations of a pair of stars that survive or so our galaxy—the Milky Way Galaxy—in a galaxy named M33. The cardinal stars orbit each separate. From Worldly concern, it looks as if they take turns passing in advance of each unusual.

Researchers from San Diego State University figured out that one of the stars is immense—70 times as big Eastern Samoa Earth's sun. Past looking for at how longitudinal it takes each star to occur in front of the other, the team determined that the smaller of these stars is super compact.

The scientists' calculations showed that the compact wi is 15.65 times as massive as our sun. With that much mass, it must be a black hole. In fact, it is the heaviest stellar black yap that has ever been accurately measured. The scientists estimate that the star that produced it was originally 100 times as massive as the sun.

It is hard to explain the pairing of a huge leading with a huge black hole using current theories about the life cycles of stars, the researchers say.

For one thing, prior to its collapse into a black hole, the initially larger star should have produced a strong wind that would have blown off much of its mint. Besides, before in life history, this star would birth briefly swollen, spilling some of its mass onto its pardner. Losing whol of that mass could have ready-made it hard for that star to remain massive enough to form a giant black hole.

A second recent discovery is even harder to explain. Researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Halfway for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., studied X-rays sexual climax from a speckle in another nearby galaxy called IC 10. The pattern of radiotherapy they observed, these researchers tell, most likely comes from the coupling of a sunny, heavy star with a more compact object.

On the basis of their observations, the scientists calculated that the compact body is a black hole that is 25 to 34 times as massive as the sun.

The new discoveries suggest that starring winds drive off much less star mass than researchers used to think they did. The finds also suggest that there may be many unexpectedly huge stellar blackness holes throughout the universe.—Emily Sohn

Going Deeper:

Cowen, Ron. 2007. Odd couples: Big black holes challenge star theory. Science News 172(Oct. 27):261-262. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071027/fob5.asp .