Smallest black hole ever found

The black hole, if it truly exists, would weigh less than three times the mass of the sun, putting it near the theoretical minimum mass required for a black hole to be stable.
The researchers can't directly observe the black hole, but they measured a rise and fall in X-ray light coming from a binary star system in our Milky Way galaxy that they think signals the presence of a black hole.
Until now, this X-ray pattern, which is similar to a heartbeat registered on an electrocardiogram, has been seen in only one other black hole system.
NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) spacecraft measured this X-ray heartbeat in a star system in the direction of the constellation Scorpius, at a distance between 16,000 and 65,000 light-years away (a light-year is the distance light travels in a single year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). 
Researchers think the system, officially called IGR J17091-3624, includes one normal star with a companion black hole. Mass would stream off this normal star and fall toward the black hole, forming a flattened disk around it. As friction in the disk heats the gas to millions of degrees, the disk would emit high-energy X-rays that can be seen across the galaxy.
As changes occur inside the disk, cyclical variations can be seen in the X-rays streaming from it, which pulse in varied intensity like a heartbeat.
The astronomers recognized the signal from this system because of its similarity to another black hole system called GRS 1915+105 that pulses in much the same way. This other system contains a black hole that weighs about 14 times the sun's mass, which sends out X-rays in highly structured patterns that last between seconds and hours.

Posted by adnan bin nawab on 13:21. Filed under breakingnews, gallery, technology . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0