CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 5 (UPI) -- U.S. astronomers have discovered the largest known black hole to orbit a star -- with a mass 24 to 33 times that of the sun.
The astronomers said the newly discovered object belongs to the category of "stellar-mass" black holes that form from dying stars and are smaller than the monster black holes found in galactic cores. The previous largest known stellar-mass black hole is a 16-solar-mass black hole in the galaxy M33, announced Oct. 17.
"We weren’t expecting to find a stellar-mass black hole this massive," said Andrea Prestwich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., lead author of the discovery. "It seems likely that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized."
The black hole is located in the dwarf galaxy IC 10, located about 1.8 million light years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.
The discovery is reported in the Nov. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
