Scientists Have Discovered A 'Monster' Black Hole That's So Big It Shouldn't Exist

• Scientists have discovered a black hole — the type that forms after massive stars die, collapse, and explode.
• The black hole, named LB-1, was located about 15,000 light years away with mass 70 times greater than the sun.
• Chinese researchers were the ones who released their findings early this week.

MANILA, Philippines—Scientists have discovered a “monster black hole” so massive that, in theory, it shouldn’t exist.

It’s a stellar black hole — the type that forms after massive stars die, collapse, and explode. Researchers had previously believed that the size limit was no more than 20 times the mass of our sun because as these stars die, they lose most of their mass through explosions that expel matter and gas lost to stellar winds.

This theory has now been toppled by LB-1, the newly-discovered black hole. Located about 15,000 light years away, it has a mass 70 times greater than the sun.

The findings were published by Chinese researchers in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

“Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” said Liu Jifeng, head of the team that made the discovery. “LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation.”

Scientists are now scratching their heads at how LB-1 got so huge.

The Chinese team has proposed a number of theories. LB-1’s sheer size suggests that it “was not formed from the collapse of only one star,” the study said — instead, it could potentially be two smaller black holes orbiting each other.

Another possibility is that it formed from a “fallback supernova.” This is when a supernova — the last stage of an exploding star  ejects material during the explosion, which then falls back into the supernova, creating a black hole.

LB-1 is not the biggest black hole ever discovered — but it may be the largest of its kind. There are several types of black holes, and stellar black holes like LB-1 are on the smaller side, according to NASA. Supermassive black holes are much bigger — they can be billions of times the mass of our sun.

“This discovery forces us to re-examine our models of how stellar-mass black holes form,” said David Reitze, a physicist at the University of Florida. In May, Reitze’s team made its own breakthrough discovery — observing the never-before-seen collision of a neutron star and a black hole, which sent out ripples in space and time.

These twin discoveries — the collision, and now LB-1 — indicate that scientists are reaching “a renaissance in our understanding of black hole astrophysics,” said Reitze.—CNN