Scientists believe they have discovered a new class of black holes: galactic mini-instruments so small that they were thought to not exist. This is stated by a study published Thursday in the journal Science .

The new localized black hole would have only 3.3 times the mass of our sun. As EL MUNDO details its discoverer, Todd Thompson of the Ohio State University, "this object is located on the outskirts of the Milky Way, in the Auriga constellation ."

In their study, scientists led by Todd Thompson offer a new way to look for black holes and show that it is possible that there are smaller black holes than had been detected to date.

For many years, known black holes had between five and 15 times the mass of the Sun while neutron stars (what some stars become when they die) are generally not more than 2.1 times the mass of the sun. In the summer of 2017, scientists from the LIGO project to search for gravitational waves detected the fusion of two huge black holes in a galaxy located 1.8 million light years away. Their masses were 31 and 22 times that of our sun respectively.

As Thompson recalls, it was a spectacular find, not only because he proved that the LIGO gravitational wave interferometer worked, but because the masses of those black holes were huge. Until then no large black holes had been detected. That was when it occurred to Thompson to find out if there would be small ones too.

Prior to their study, Thompson states, "the two smallest known black holes had uncertain sizes:" one had a range of between 2.3 and 9.5 times the mass of the Sun and the other, between 2.7 and 7, 5".

Tracking the Milky Way

To carry out this study, the scientists used data collected by the APOGEE (Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment) experiment, which observes 100,000 stars of the Milky Way, and chose the 200 that seemed most interesting to them. Subsequently, they selected a red giant star that apparently orbited an object that, according to their calculations, was much smaller than the known black holes in the Milky Way but larger than most neutron stars.

They made new measurements with Gaia , the satellite of the European Space Agency that is making a census of stars, and thus they saw that they had found a black hole of little mass, probably 3.3 times the mass of the Sun.

For José Luis Gómez, one of the research leaders who got the first image of a black hole, "perhaps the most important thing is that this finding limits the minimum mass that a black hole can have to even lower values." Although scientists do not know well what that minimum mass may be, "it is thought that a neutron star cannot be approximately 2 to 3 times that of the Sun, because in that case it would become a black hole," says Gomez. , not linked to the study of Science .

As the Spanish researcher explains, " the end of a star's life depends on its mass . If it is less than about 1.4 times that of the Sun, it ends up expelling its outer layers and only the core of the star remains, what we call a dwarf white. Our sun will end like this. "

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