The black hole is orbiting an extremely luminous and hot blue star with a mass about 25 times that of our Sun.
Astronomers have spotted what they are calling a cosmic "needle in a haystack" — a black hole that not only is classified as dormant but appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star.
"The challenge is finding those objects," said Tomer Shenar, a research fellow in astronomy at Amsterdam University and lead author of the study published in the journal"It's the first object of its kind discovered after astronomers have been searching for decades," said astronomer and study co-author Kareem El-Badry, of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
There are different categories of black holes. The smallest, like the newly detected one, are so-called stellar-mass black holes, formed by the collapse of massive individual stars at the ends of their life cycles. There are also intermediate-mass black holes, as well as the enormous supermassive black holes residing at the centre of most galaxies.
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