Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have detected a stellar-mass black hole much further away than any other previously known. With a mass about twenty times that of the Sun, this is also the second most massive stellar-mass black hole ever found. The newly announced black hole lies in a spiral galaxy called NGC 300, six million light-years from Earth.
This image composite shows the spectacular spiral galaxy NGC 300 as seen in an image from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2), as well as the position of the stellar-mass black hole in the galaxy in an image obtained with the FORS2 instrument on the VLT.
ESO/ Digitized Sky Survey 2/P. Crowther
CC BY 4.0
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1004b/">NGC 300 X-1 in the spiral galaxy NGC 300 (ESO 1004b)</a>