Black holes are increasing in the universe...the discovery of a massive star orbiting something we don't see!

The circle of known black holes in the universe is expanding, with a team of astrophysicists announcing the discovery of the first "dormant" stellar-mass black hole orbiting another star in a neighboring galaxy.

And while these black holes are believed to be common in the universe, they have proven difficult to find.

"The international team found a needle in a haystack," said Tomer Schinar, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, lead author of the new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The team was searching in the sky for an object that eventually turned out to be a binary black hole, in which two black holes orbit each other after swallowing their stars in a supernova explosion.

"We found a massive star that weighs 25 times the mass of our sun and orbits something we don't see," Shinar told AFP.

Researchers believe that the blue star, located in the large Magellanic Cloud galaxy that neighbors the Milky Way, is constantly associated with a black hole nine times the mass of our sun.

These types of black holes are usually discovered by X-rays they emit while collecting material from their companion star.

But this binary system, known as VFTS243, is described as "dormant" because it does not emit X-rays and is not close enough to absorb matter from its star.

The Milky Way alone is believed to contain about 100 million stellar-mass black holes, which are much smaller than its large, super-massive siblings, said astrophysicist KU Leuven in Belgium.

But Sana, a co-author of the study, explained that only ten such black holes have been found.

This may be because many of these wormholes remain dormant, taking a long time to eventually swallow their companion star.

Sana pointed out that observing these holes was like watching two people dancing in a dark room, one wearing white and the other wearing black.

One may only be visible, but the other is also present.

"We have never discovered such systems before," Chinar told AFP. "There have been a few claims in the past years, but they have been more or less refuted."

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