The black region in the center represents the black hole's event horizon, where no light can escape the massive object's gravitational grip.

But researchers believed that typical stars in the Milky Way shed most of their gas through stellar winds, preventing the emergence of a black hole the size of LB-1, Liu said.

The newly discovered black hole, named LB-1, is located 15,000 light-years from Earth, according to a press release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A paper on the discovery has been published in the journal Nature.

"Sunless holes of such mass must no longer ever even exist in our galaxy, in response to most of primarily the latest units of stellar evolution", said Liu Jifeng, head of the team that made the discovery.

That said, the Chinese-led team noted that, if LB-1 were closer, it would be less luminous and less massive - and its observed temperature can not be explained with less luminosity. "Now theorists will must recall within the difficulty of explaining its formation".

The Chinese language team has proposed a set of theories. NASA says it happens when big stars expire in a supernova blast that collapses under the force of gravity. Another possibility is that it was formed from a "recoil" supernova.

Another theory is that the debris ejected from a supernova fell right back into the supernova, and in so doing, created a black hole.

A new discovery is blasting a hole in scientific theories about the Milky Way galaxy.

Bregman said scientists are always trying to learn more about the birth and death of stars, and the discovery of one as large as LB-1 could inform that process. Stellar black holes are often isolated, rarely pulling in large objects, and that makes them hard to detect and study.

According to Chinese astronomers who discovered LB-1, it is possible that the enormous black hole is not formed by the collapse of a star, but is the result of two smaller black holes in orbit.

Our Milky Way is estimated to contain 100 million stellar black holes, according to the CAS press release. That's because, until a couple of years ago, the only way scientists could discover these giant beasts was by detecting the X-rays they emitted while they chomped away at their stellar companions.

The researchers on the Chinese language Academy of Sciences tried a assorted capacity.

Searching for black holes has only become possible in the last few years, thanks to recent developments in telescopes and detectors. LB-1 was discovered by examining its companion star, which is roughly eight times the size of the sun.

It had been thought that stellar black holes - that is, black holes that are born in the wake of a large star's death - max out at about 20 times the mass of our Sun. In May, Reitze's team made its own breakthrough discovery - observing the never-before-seen collision of a neutron star and a black hole, which sent out ripples in space and time.