The astronomers found it using the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile and observed how the black hole’s gravity affects the motion of a nearby star, roughly five times the mass of our Sun.

It is the first time that this method has been used to detect a black hole and could help researchers discover other black holes hidden in our Milky Way and other galaxies.

The more astronomers know about black holes, the better they can understand how these cosmic bodies form and change over time. An article describing this discovery has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While black holes are difficult to detect, they tend to give up their invisible existence through their actions. Black holes emit X-rays when they eat up material around them, create gravitational waves when they collide with each other, or collide with dense neutron stars.

But not all black holes are the same, and this is even smaller than what other astronomers have discovered. The researchers only noticed it once they saw a star with strange motion among many other stars that did not behave in the same way.

“The vast majority (of black holes) can only be detected dynamically,” study co-author Stefan Drisler and professor at the University of Göttingen in Germany said in a statement.

“When they form a star system, they will affect its movement in a subtle but detectable way, so we can find it with sophisticated tools.”

This image shows NGC1850, a group of thousands of stars 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where the black hole is located.
It is the first time that astronomers have found a small black hole in a group of stars that is also young, around 100 million years old, which is a childhood compared to the rest of the universe.

In the future, astronomers can use this method to find other young black holes to understand their evolution and compare it to larger black holes in older star clusters to see how black holes grow over time.

“The vast majority (of black holes) can only be detected dynamically,” study co-author Stefan Drisler and professor at the University of Göttingen in Germany said in a statement.

“When they form a star system, they will affect its movement in a subtle but detectable way, so we can find it with sophisticated tools.”

This image shows NGC1850, a group of thousands of stars 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where the black hole is located.
It is the first time that astronomers have found a small black hole in a group of stars that is also young, around 100 million years old, which is a childhood compared to the rest of the universe.

In the future, astronomers can use this method to find other young black holes to understand their evolution and compare it to larger black holes in older star clusters to see how black holes grow over time.