According to a recent issue of Nature, a team, headed by Prof. LIU Jifeng of the National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC), observed a black hole of 70 more than solar masses 15 thousand light-years away from the Earth. Researchers names it LB-1.

Prof. LIU said that that the new models of stellar evolution tells us that our galaxy is not supposed to have such massive back holes, it has double the mass of what was thought possible. He said that it’s a challenge for the theorists to explain its formation.

Scientists have identified and measured only around two dozen stellar black holes in our galaxy since most of them do not emit any kind of revealing radiation.

Prof. LIU, along with his collaborators, looked for the stars being pulled by an invisible object’s gravity, with China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST).

This research, even with modern technology, is very limited as only one in a thousand stars can be seen orbiting a black hole.

The physical parameters of the system were determined by the largest optical telescopes in the world, Spain’s 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias and the Americal 10-m Keck I telescope. The results were terrific. The black hole of 70 solar masses was observed to be orbited by an 8 solar mass star, every 79 days.  

This discovery is a good match to that of the gravitational waves through the collision of two back holes, detected by LIGO and VIRGO. Surprisingly, those two black holes were also more massive than the previously thought typical black holes.

Prof. David Reitz, the LIGO Director, said that we are forced to re-define our understanding of massive black holes formation after this discovery. He further mentioned that this discovery along with the collision of binary black holes detected by LIGO-VIRGO is a revival of our understanding of black holes Astrophysics.