Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
Astronomers have uncovered a 600,000-solar-mass black hole hiding in the LMC—our galactic neighbor—revealed by stars flung through space at millions of miles per hour.
Representative pic
The LMC’s newfound black hole acts like a stellar cannon, hurling hypervelocity stars into intergalactic space, some moving so fast they’ll never return.
Runaway stars racing from the Milky Way led scientists to trace their paths back to the LMC, where a lurking supermassive black hole had gone unnoticed until now.
When binary stars stray too close to the LMC’s black hole, one gets captured while the other is launched like a bullet—solving a long-standing mystery of hypervelocity stars.
Though smaller than the Milky Way’s Sagittarius A*, this LMC black hole still packs the mass of 600,000 Suns, making it a rare supermassive find in a dwarf galaxy.
Just like detectives analyze trajectories, astronomers followed the paths of 21 runaway stars, uncovering the black hole’s hidden gravitational handprint.
Half of known hypervelocity stars couldn’t be explained by Sagittarius A*—until now. The LMC’s black hole finally connects the dots on these stellar outcasts.
As the LMC drifts closer to the Milky Way, this black hole could one day merge with ours, reshaping the future of both galaxies.
A cosmic predator just 160,000 light-years away—a black hole hiding "next door" that’s been slingshotting stars across space for eons.