There’s a Rogue Black Hole Out There in the Milky Way!

There’s a Rogue Black Hole Out There in the Milky Way!
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If you’re familiar with the term “rogue planet,” it means that you already suspect what a rogue black hole could be. The latter are those cosmic monsters that are wandering near the edges of a galaxy. However, astronomers recently discovered the first one, although they theorized the concept for quite a while.

According to SyFy,com, scientists might have made the first discovery of an isolated stellar-mass black hole in our Milky Way galaxy. 

The MOA-2011-BLG-191/OGLE-2011-BLG-0462 event is to blame

The MOA-2011-BLG-191/OGLE-2011-BLG-0462 cosmic event led to the discovery of the black hole that doesn’t have a name yet. However, the cosmic monster is 5,000 light-years away and roughly seven times more massive than the Sun. This can only mean that there’s no use worrying: the black hole is way too far away to pose a threat to our planet. 

If you’re not scared by the black hole in question, you should know that the Universe is teeming with non-rogue black holes. Astronomers calculated that there are 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 black holes in the entire observable Universe. Just in case you thought that our Cosmos is a friendly place, there you have it! However, there’s no sign that either of these black holes is dangerously close to Earth, as far as astronomers know.

If there are so many black holes in the observable part of the Universe, the number of these cosmic monsters in our entire Universe could be even more staggering! The entire Universe could be even thousands of times bigger than what astronomers call the “observable Universe”.

As for our own Milky Way galaxy, there should be billions of black holes wandering out there! This means that astronomers will never run out of material to study!

The study paper regarding the rogue black hole is not yet peer-reviewed. However, it was submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.


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Even since he was a child, Cristian was staring curiously at the stars, wondering about the Universe and our place in it. Today he's seeing his dream come true by writing about the latest news in astronomy. Cristian is also glad to be covering health and other science topics, having significant experience in writing about such fields.

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