New study discredits the largest ‘monster’ black hole ever discovered in 2019

A pair of scientists published a study debunking the discovery of the monstrous black hole that was discovered in 2019. Scientists claimed that the mass of the black hole, which was considered to be the largest ever discovered, was incorrectly measured.

The new study was carried out by scientists at the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy in Belgium. It was published in the journal Nature.

The largest black hole ever discovered

For the study, scientists focused on the discovery of a black hole monster in November last year. According to a study on the black hole, which was also published in the journal Nature, the massive cosmic object was discovered in a binary system inhabited by a star known as LB-1.
It was discovered by a team of scientists led by Jifeng Liu of the China National Astronomical Observatory (NAOC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Incredible mass of the black hole monster

Observations in the system revealed that the star, which has eight solar masses, orbited a massive black hole that was approximately 70 times more massive than the Sun. Scientists theorized that the black hole formed when a massive star collapsed under the weight of its own gravity.

The discovery immediately caught the attention of the scientific community due to the impressive size of the black hole. Typically, the black holes that formed after the collapse of a star were only 20 to 30 solar masses. However, as other scientists began to investigate the LB-1 system, they finally discovered that the monstrous black hole may not be real.

Debunking the monster’s black hole

Scientists Michael Abdul-Masih and Hugues Sana of the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy recently published a new document that discredits the existence of the massive black hole. By looking at the black hole with the Flemish Mercator telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, they discovered that the scientists who discovered the LB-1 black hole could have used the wrong signal to measure its mass.

As Abdul-Masih and Sana pointed out, the signal came from the movement of the system star and not from the black hole. “Once we consider the motion of the B-type stellar spectrum, the signal used to calculate the high mass of the (putative) black hole disappears and there is no indication of a high-mass black hole left in the data,” Sana told him. he told Space.com.