So what did we discover? We discovered a
low-mass black hole there are a bunch of
black holes out there some are
supermassive and at the center are the
Centers of galaxies, others are lower
mass about the mass of ten times the
mass of our Sun and the one that we
found an unexpectedly small mass black
hole of about three times the mass of
our Sun in a binary system with another
star. But we know there must be hundreds
of thousands of black holes out there
with a companion star where they're not
interacting where the gas is not being
siphoned off. So we went looking for
these dark systems where the black hole
is not emitting any x-rays but it's
still orbiting another star and we found
one and what was surprising is that we
found a black hole that was lower in
mass than all of the black holes that
have been found before. The coolest thing
to me about this discovery is that we
used a new combination of methods put
together to find a new type of system
that we didn't know existed before.
Whenever anything is moving towards you
or away from you its light is shifted
to the blue word and then red word we
use that in combination with an all-sky
monitoring campaign that is run out of
Ohio State. All over the world we monitor
all of the stars that we can see in the
sky about 50 or 100 million of those
stars every night. The coolest thing to
me about being a scientist is that there
are all these things out there just
waiting to be known and that if you just
go looking in a new way with new
instruments with new telescopes or
combine the data in some new way that
hasn't been combined before you could
find something that you did not
anticipate. I'm Todd Thompson and you
should vote for our new black hole
discovery as the best science story of
2019.
