Black hole debunkers now find one themselves

A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have now found one themselves. It is a relatively small, quiet, black hole in a neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way. The universe should be full of such black holes, but they are hard to find. The researchers, led by Tomer Shenar (University of Amsterdam), published their findings Monday night in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one," says study leader Tomer Shenar. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT).