'Black hole police' discover a dormant black hole outside our galaxy

A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own. 'For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,' says study leader Tomer Shenar of the Anton Pannekoek Institute of the University of Amsterdam. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT). Other API scientists involved in this research are Alex de Koter and Silvia Toonen.