Lightest Black Hole

On 14 August 2019, scientists at gravitational wave experiments LIGO, USA and VIRGO, Italy detected gravitational waves from a blackhole swallowing another 'object'. The main black hole was 26 times the mass of our Sun whilst the object it swallowed was only 2.6 times that of the Sun. The low mass of this second object is too great for it to be a Neutron star and would therefore be the lightest Black Hole ever witnessed in the cosmos. The merging of these objects, noted as event GW190814 highlights an unknown piece of theoretical science called the mass gap; this is mass of objects that lie between the largest Neutron Star that could form and what scientists previously thought could be the smallest black hole at around 5 times the mass of our Sun. This new object's mass was measured with high degree of certainty as being too big for a Neutron Star and hence must be a black hole; perhaps previously formed by the merger of two other Neutron Stars that had enough mass to collapse to this small Black Hole. The discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on 23 June 2020.