Researchers have discovered a rare and mysterious object in the Milky Way Galaxy, which may be a combination of a black hole and a special type of star.
Located about 40,000 light-years from Earth, it is an object with truly special properties he haveIts mass lies between the heaviest neutron star ever and the lightest black hole. The strange formation is not completely unknown to researchers, because science has long been interested in this rare and mysterious region, called the mass gap, where celestial objects are still too light to be black holes, but are already too heavy to be neutron stars.
A pulsar, i.e. a rapidly rotating neutron star, has been discovered near the formation by scientists, who believe this may be the first pulsar-black hole pairing discovered by science. They believe that the collision of two neutron stars could have created the massive object now orbiting the pulsar.
According to the researchers, this discovery is also important because it allows new experiments related to Einstein's general theory of relativity and opens the door for further study of black holes.
Scientists observed the aforementioned celestial body using the MeerKAT telescope while monitoring a large star cluster known as NGC 1851 in the southern Columba constellation.
