* Astronomy

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RE: NGC 300 X-1

Blobrana · L

Astronomers have spied a star-sized black hole much further away than any such object previously known.
It has a mass 20 times that of our Sun and is sited six million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 300.
The discovery was made using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility on Mount Paranal in Chile.
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Blobrana · L

Zoom in onto the stellar black hole NGC 300 X-1

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Blobrana · L

Black Hole Hunters Set New Distance Record

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have detected, in another galaxy, a stellar-mass black hole much farther away than any other previously known. With a mass above fifteen times that of the Sun, this is also the second most massive stellar-mass black hole ever found. It is entwined with a star that will soon become a black hole itself.
The stellar-mass black holes found in the Milky Way weigh up to ten times the mass of the Sun and are certainly not be taken lightly, but, outside our own galaxy, they may just be minor-league players, since astronomers have found another black hole with a mass over fifteen times the mass of the Sun. This is one of only three such objects found so far.
The newly announced black hole lies in a spiral galaxy called NGC 300, six million light-years from Earth.

"This is the most distant stellar-mass black hole ever weighed, and it's the first one we've seen outside our own galactic neighbourhood, the Local Group" - Paul Crowther, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sheffield and lead author of the paper reporting the study.

The black hole;s curious partner is a Wolf-Rayet star, which also has a mass of about twenty times as much as the Sun.

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