They think there should be a continuum of sizes because, over cosmic time, collisions between stellar-mass black holes should have created some intermediate-mass black holes,
The maximum mass for a stellar black hole is a matter of active scientific debate,
This black hole is not only very massive, it is also very peculiar in many aspects. It is really something we never expected to see,
The surprising result for me was the fact that the chemical composition of this companion star does not show anything special, so it was not affected by the supernova explosion of the black hole,
Remarkably, this black hole is also extremely close to us - at a mere 2000 light years away in the constellation Aquila, it is the second closest known black hole to Earth."
It’s impressive to see the transformational impact Gaia is having on astronomy and astrophysics,
What strikes me is that the chemical composition of the companion is similar to what we find in old metal-poor stars in the galaxy,
No one was expecting to find a high-mass black hole lurking nearby, undetected so far. This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life,
We could see a star a little smaller than the sun (around 75 percent of its mass) and brighter, that revolved around an invisible companion,
The black hole is close to us, on the scale of our galaxy,
As soon as this comes out people will rush to observe it to see if there are any emissions from the black hole,
We have only seen black holes of this mass with gravitational waves in faraway galaxies,
Most of them don’t have a star orbiting around them, so they are almost invisible to us,
Only the central black hole in the Milky Way is more massive than this one,
It’s a complete surprise,
We took the exceptional step of publishing this paper based on preliminary data ahead of the forthcoming Gaia release because of the unique nature of the discovery,
I'm unclear whether I still have a job in October, or whether I can keep it one more year,
We will continue to strongly make the case for the continued full support of Chandra, which the astrophysics community recognizes as a highly functioning facility that provides transformational science and crucial support to many of NASA's primary astrophysics goals,
For many years it was the most productive mission in NASA's program if measured in publications/dollar spent,
Often you get like a gas cloud that's glowing, and then there's this X-ray source in the middle that's pumping the energy into it that's causing it to glow,