The New Monstrous Black Hole in the Neighborhood: Meet LB-1!

In a paper published yesterday in the journal Nature, Chinese astronomers describe an enormous stellar black hole on the other side of the Milky Way. Dubbed LB-1, this monstrous black hole should not even exist. This behemoth has approximately 70 times the mass of the sun.



The Chinese astronomers used cutting-edge technology to hunt for black holes in our galaxy. It seems their quest proved fruitful. The Large sky Area Multi-Object fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (Lamost) found stars moving across the sky and seemingly orbiting a massive invisible object.

The discovery received follow up observations from the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain and the Keck Observatory in the U.S. Everybody corroborated the results. We know since the 1700s that we cannot detect black holes in a traditional way (since they don’t emit light). Nevertheless, we could observe them if a light-emitting celestial body orbited them – such a companion star.