Astronomers have been left stunned after uncovering a "stealthy" gigantic black hole "hiding in the galaxy next door".
A supermassive black hole has been found lurking in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere.
At just 158,000 light years away, it's the closest supermassive black hole to Earth outside our own Milky Way.
The massive cosmic object had remained hidden until now - despite extensive research on the LMC.
A supermassive black hole has been found lurking in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)
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The newly-discovered black hole, named LMC*, is approximately 600,000 times the mass of our sun.
Despite its enormous size, LMC* is still dwarfed by our own galaxy's supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, which is about 4 million times the mass of our local star.
Researchers detected it using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission as they conducted a years-long study of "hypervelocity stars".
Such stars are created through dramatic cosmic events - they form when a double-star system ventures too close to a supermassive black hole.
The black hole's intense gravitational pull then rips the two stars apart.
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The hulking black hole is approximately 600,000 times the mass of our sun
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One star gets captured into a close orbit around the black hole, while the other is violently ejected at extraordinarily high speeds.
These ejected stars can reach velocities that will eventually propel them out of their galaxy entirely.
Jesse Han, the paper's lead author and an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics, highlighted the significance of the finding.
"Despite the LMC being one of the best studied galaxies, this is the first evidence that the LMC has a supermassive black hole in its center," Han told Forbes.
The discovery challenges previous understanding of dwarf galaxies like the LMC*.
Researchers identified a pattern called the Leo Overdensity, a concentration of hypervelocity stars in the sky.
"We showed that the hypervelocity stars that make up this over density all trace back to the LMC*," Han explained.
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Researchers detected it using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission (pictured)
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Out of 21 hypervelocity stars traced, nine were confidently classified as originating from the LMC.
"We realised that half the stars cannot come from Sag A* based on their direction of orbit. Instead, their direction pointed directly towards the LMC," said Han.
Researchers have struggled to locate the black hole due to the LMC*'s size and structure.
"The LMC is quite large on the sky, and due to ongoing deformations of the galaxy, its 'centre' is not well defined," Han explained.
"I'd like to know where exactly the SMBH is, and what its immediate surroundings look like."
The team now hope to find optical, radio or x-ray evidence of the black hole in a bid to pinpoint LMC*'s exact location.
