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Birth of Black Hole Possibly Being Observed

Posted by michael on from the hole-in-the-middle-of-it-all dept.

TheTXLibra writes "Robert Roy Britt reports on Space.com that we may now be witnessing the earliest stages of black hole development. Star SN 1986J, began to collapse in 1983 into a neutron star, resulting in a supernova explosion in 1986. If the mass of the neutron star reaches 1.4 times the mass of Earth's Sun, it will theoretically collapse into a black hole, if not, it will stabilize as a neutron star."

1 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Knowing where to look... by beeplet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The article didn't even mention one of the most important reasons this is interesting - so far the only stellar-mass blackhole candidates are in binary systems (where you can infer the mass of an unseen object from the orbit of the visible star). Otherwise, you can't see find a black hole unless you know where to look - and now we do.

    (I guess you could also theoretically look for black holes by their gravitational lensing effects, but you would have to monitor a huge number of stars and hope that a black hole intercepts your line-of-sight to one of them, so not very practical.)