An international group of scientists from Germany, Italy, Australia and other countries found a strange object 40 thousand light years from Earth. The mysterious object turned out to be heavier than any known neutron star but lighter than the smallest black hole ever discovered. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Science.
The anomaly was discovered using the MeerKAT radio telescope in the Northern Cape in South Africa. It lies within our Milky Way galaxy, within a dense group of stars known as the globular cluster NGC 1851.
The unknown object is located in the same system as radio pulsar PSR J0514-4002E, a rapidly rotating neutron star.
According to astronomers, this discovery could play an important role in solving the scientific mystery known as the black hole mass gap. According to calculations, when a massive star collapses, a black hole forms if its remaining mass is at least 2.2 times the mass of the Sun. However, all black holes known to science were at least five times larger than the Sun.
Another hypothesis suggests that a superdense object orbiting pulsar PSR J0514-4002E may have emerged from the collision of two other neutron stars.
Scientists plan to continue studying the anomaly and determine its nature through further observations.
Earlier astronomers to create The oldest and furthest black hole from Earth.