New Black Hole Discovered Outside the Milky Way

Recently, astronomers, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), have discovered a small black hole outside the Milky Way galaxy.

• The team used data collected over two years with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) mounted at ESO's VLT, located in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Key Highlights: Location: The newly found black hole was spotted lurking in NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy of the Milky Way.

• Mass: The black hole is roughly eleven times as massive as our Sun.
• Gravitational Influence: The smoking gun that put the astronomers on the trail of this black hole was its gravitational influence on the five-solar-mass star orbiting it.
• The detection in NGC 1850 marks the first time a black hole has been found in a young cluster of stars which is only around 100 million years old.