***Between the largest neutron stars and the smallest black holes we had a big hole. Until now. Discovery of a strange companion of a red giant stars fills the void perfectly.***

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At first, nobody believed in black holes. That everyone was afraid of them. Now they are just a common thing in the Universe. We just got used to them even though we do not understand how they work and what is inside of them. But scientists consider them important enough that they are trying to create a list of all black holes in the Milky Way.

The thing is, there is a lot we do not know about black holes. Todd Thompson from Ohio State University and his colleagues think that we may have been overlooking a class of black holes that should be smaller than the smallest of so far known black holes. And their research was recently published by the journal Science.

If we don't count supermassive black holes for a long time we knew only about black holes that have a mass of roughly 5 – 10 Suns. And the largest neutron stars have a mass of roughly 2.1 Suns and according to current theories, they cannot be bigger. The gravitational observatory LIGO recently detected the merger of two black holes that had a mass of roughly 31 and 25 Suns. This was the first piece of real evidence that proved the existence of massive black holes.

Thompson and other astrophysicists were long suspecting black holes that they would have a mass of more than 15 Suns. And the LIGO observatory confirmed that. Now there is just one gap that needs to be filled. The gap where we should find black holes heavier than neutron stars but smaller than the known black holes. But we can find them?

Thompson s team used the data from the APOGEE project. This experiment got the spectra from around a hundred thousand stars in the Milky Way. From these data, you can find out if the star has a stellar companion that would be undetectable by normal means. Thompson and his colleagues analyzed the data, narrowed it down and got a list of 200 star systems that could be interesting.

After running the data through the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN). This system is run by Ohio State University and already detected around 1000 supernovae. They found a red giant that has something that cannot be detected orbiting this. And this “something” is smaller than any of the known black holes and yet bigger than known neutron stars.

## Sources:
* https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6465/637

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