A massive black hole nearly 20,000 times the size of the sun has been confirmed as the closest to Earth's solar system by an international study involving University of Queensland researchers.
The study involved analysing and cataloguing 1.4 million stars in the Omega Centauri cluster amongst the Milky Way — where the black hole was located amongst the innermost stars at the centre — roughly 18,000 light-years from Earth.
This analysis was then compared to theoretical research models by University of Queensland associate professor Holger Baumgardt, who told Breakfast he was "amazed" by the discovery.
"I was absolutely fascinated because it was immediately clear to me we found something special."
He said researchers had spent 20 years searching for proof that one of these black holes existed, and had finally succeeded.
"The black hole that we found has a mass of about 18,000 times the mass of our sun. So, this is a mass range that no black hole has ever been known to exist."
Baumgardt said the well-established "stellar-mass black holes" that form at the end of a star's lifetime range from between 10 times as large as the sun, to "super massive black holes" that are 1 billion times the size of the sun.
"We have found the first one that is really in the middle of that mass range," he said.
He said the next step for scientists would be to undertake more observations of the black hole to help with future discoveries.
"We'll learn a bit more about it, [such as] what exactly is its mass? Is it also rotating? And we also want to find more of these black holes."
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