Smallest known Black Hole discovered by NASA scientists

April 5, 2008

Image from Wikipedia

Has you might imagine there are several sizes of black holes and this one besides being the smallest ever found still digests everything around him because of the huge gravitational force that even draws light into it.
The previous record holder would weight 6.3 Suns which isn’t much when we know black holes weighting up to billions times the weight of our Sun.
NASA scientists Nikolai Shaposhnikov and Lev Titarchuk identified this black hole which is the smallest (15 miles across) and the lightest known black hole in the universe weighting only 3.8 of our suns.
This discovery was made with the help of NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite that was launched in late 1995.
This flyweight XTE J1650 which exists outside our star system was formed in the center of a dying star when she ran out of fuel and collapsed due to its own gravity into a black hole. As well as being the smallest known black hole scientist also think that it must be very close of being the smallest possible size for a black hole because if after the star collapses the result is less than 3 times the weight of our sun, instead of becoming a black hole it becomes a called neutron star.
Amazing how this powerful and fearful phenomenon of the universe only measures 15 miles that is the size of a city.

Photo above: The lowest-mass known black hole belongs to a binary system named XTE J1650-500. The black hole has about 3.8 times the mass of our sun, and is orbited by a companion star, as depicted in this illustration. Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobar

The measurement of the black hole’s mass is due to high-precision timing observations made by NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite, shown here prior to launch. Credit: NASA

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