A large black hole that "should not exist" in the Milky Way has been discovered. The black hole, named LB-1, was detected after researchers found a star with an orbit that could only be explained if it had a "dark companion." This companion, they found, was a black hole with a mass 70 times that of the sun—far bigger than current models of stellar evolution allow for.

David Reitze, the director of the gravitational wave detector LIGO, who was not involved in the study, commented on the findings. "This discovery forces us to re-examine our models of how stellar-mass black holes form," he said in a statement. "This remarkable result, along with the LIGO-Virgo detections of binary black hole collisions during the past four years, really points towards a renaissance in our understanding of black hole astrophysics."