By GB News (World News) | Created at 2025-03-10 16:01:19 | Updated at 2025-03-10 19:01:06
3 hours ago
Astronomers have been left stunned after uncovering a "stealthy" gigantic black hole "hiding in the galaxy next door".
A supermassive black hole has been found lurking in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere.
At just 158,000 light years away, it's the closest supermassive black hole to Earth outside our own Milky Way.
The massive cosmic object had remained hidden until now - despite extensive research on the LMC.
A supermassive black hole has been found lurking in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The hulking black hole is approximately 600,000 times the mass of our sun
NASA
Researchers detected it using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission (pictured)
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Out of 21 hypervelocity stars traced, nine were confidently classified as originating from the LMC.
"We realised that half the stars cannot come from Sag A* based on their direction of orbit. Instead, their direction pointed directly towards the LMC," said Han.
Researchers have struggled to locate the black hole due to the LMC*'s size and structure.
"The LMC is quite large on the sky, and due to ongoing deformations of the galaxy, its 'centre' is not well defined," Han explained.
"I'd like to know where exactly the SMBH is, and what its immediate surroundings look like."
The team now hope to find optical, radio or x-ray evidence of the black hole in a bid to pinpoint LMC*'s exact location.
