Astronomers famously snapped the first ever direct image of a black hole in 2019, thanks to material glowing in its presence. But many black holes are actually near impossible to detect. Now another team using the Hubble Space Telescope seems to have finally found something nobody has seen before: a black hole which is completely invisible. The research, which has been posted online and submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, is yet to be peer-reviewed.
Black holes are what’s left after large stars die and their cores collapse. They are incredibly dense, with gravity so strong that nothing can move fast enough to escape them, including light. Astronomers are keen to study black holes because they can tell us a lot about the ways that stars die. By measuring the masses of black holes, we can learn about what was going on in stars’ final moments, when their cores were collapsing and their outer layers were being expelled.
