Article Summary #3

Amos, J. 'Farthest' Star-Mass Black Hole. BCC News. 27 Jan 2010.

Six million light years away, astronomers have spotted a star size black hole that has a mass that is 20 times that of the sun. The discovery was made using the Very Large Telescope facility on Mount Paranal in Chile. A professor from Sheffield University said that for the amount of time that it will take the light to reach us, the star will have blown up in a supernova to produce its own black hole. If one was to be at the system right now, they would find a pair of black holes spiraling around each other. Black holes are said to come in two sizes: the super massive size and the stellar sized one. The super massive one is huge and weighs a million to a billion times the mass of the sun. The stellar size one could only be ten times the mass of the sun, and made when big stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and collapse. This new discovery is found to be in the stellar size category.

The companion is something astronomers call a Wolf-Rayet star, a giant, hot, highly-evolved star that is billowing gas into space. A lot of this material is being pulled into the black hole and assuming the Wolf-Rayet arrives at the expected time, then the system will have the two black holes grow together. Merging black holes are considered one of the most promising targets for the experiments.