An international team of astronomers have found a new and unknown object in the Milky Way that is heavier than the heaviest neutron stars known and yet simultaneously lighter than the lightest black holes known.
Using the MeerKAT Radio Telescope, astronomers from a number of institutions including The University of Manchester and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany found an object in orbit around a rapidly spinning millisecond pulsar located around 40,000 light years away in a dense group of stars known as a globular cluster.
Using the clock-like ticks from the millisecond pulsar they showed that the massive object lies in the so-called black hole mass gap.
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