Scientists announced Wednesday the discovery
of a black hole -- the oldest ever detected
-- that shouldn't even exist according to
the current understanding of cosmic monsters
so dense not even light can escape their gravitational
pull.
Born of a merger between two other black holes,
GW190521 weighs in at 142 times the mass of
our Sun and is the first "intermediate mass"
black hole ever observed, two consortiums
of some 1,500 scientists reported in a pair
of studies.
"This event is a door opening into the cosmic
process for the formation of black holes,"
co-author Stavros Katsanevas, an astrophysicist
at the European Gravitational Observatory,
said in an online press conference.
A so-called stellar-class black hole forms
when a dying star collapses, and is typically
three to ten solar masses in size.
Supermassive black holes found at the centre
of most galaxies, including the Milky Way,
range from millions to billions of solar masses.
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