Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2022

50 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING by ESO - Bárbara Ferreira A dormant black hole outside our galaxy A team of international ex- perts, renowned for de- bunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says study leader Tomer Shenar. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole van- ished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European South- ern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT). “We identified a ‘needle in a haystack’,” says Shenar T his is what the VFTS 243 binary system might look like if we looked at it closely. The system is composed of a very hot blue star, 25 times more massive than the Sun, and a black hole of at least 9 solar masses. The representation is not to scale: in reality, the blue star is about 200,000 times larger than the black hole.