Detecting black holes in space is a very difficult task because black holes absorb all kinds of light. Therefore they usually cannot be seen directly with a telescope. But every black hole does leave behind some ‘marks’ which open the doors of discovery for scientists. The high-pressure gravity of a black hole affects the motion of the things around it, which can be easily seen with a telescope. While tracking such samples, astronomers have discovered a black hole in a cluster just outside the Milky Way. It has become the first black hole seen outside our galaxy with this technique. Astronomers made the discovery using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) atop a desert mountain in northern Chile.
Scientists Behind Black Holes Like ‘Sherlock Holmes’The researchers focused the VLT on NGC 1850, a cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists in this group could see thousands of stars at once. Sarah Sarasino, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, said: “We’re looking at every star in the cluster to track the movements of a criminal like Sherlock Holmes.” And trying to find some evidence for the presence of black holes.
Youngest in 100 million year old black hole clusterThe explorers recorded the motion of the stars to find the ghost black holes. The mass of this black hole is about 11 times the mass of the Sun. This black hole in the star cluster named NGC 1850 is only 100 million years old. Astronomers say that no black hole has ever been discovered in this cluster which is so young. The research will be published in the monthly journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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