A mysterious object, halfway between a neutron star and a black hole, has been discovered in the Milky Way.
In fact, researchers have not been able to identify it because, in addition to being super-dense, it has a mass that is located exactly halfway between these two celestial bodies and which has never been found before: it could therefore be an incredibly massive neutron star or an extraordinarily small black hole.
This is what emerges from the study published in the journal Science and led by the German Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, to which the University of Bologna and the National Institute of Astrophysics of Bologna and Cagliari also contributed.
“Regardless of its nature, the discovery of a compact object with this mass has fascinating implications,” says Mays Fishbach in Science, commenting on the study led by Ewan Barr and Arunima Dutta.
The new object could, in fact, help shed new light on the physics, still not fully understood, underlying extremely dense nuclear matter, supernova explosions and other phenomena, such as neutron star mergers.
The researchers used data collected by the MeerKAT radio telescope, made up of a set of 64 antennas located in South Africa, one of the four structures that will become part of the Square Kilometer Array project, the large telescope under construction in Australia and South Africa to probe deep space.
Although its identity remains unknown, the authors of the study believe that the mysterious object may have formed in a previous merger between two neutron stars, a result of the extreme stellar environment that characterizes the dense globular cluster in which it resides.
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