Swift J1745-26 is a stellar-mass black hole located a few degrees from the center of the

Milky Way galaxy The Milky Way or Milky Way Galaxy is the galaxy that includes the Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars in other arms of the galaxy, which are ...

toward the constellation Sagittarius. It was discovered by NASA's Swift satellite on September 16, 2012 due to the detection of an X-ray nova. The pattern of X-rays from the nova indicated that the central object was a black hole. Its name arises from the coordinates of its sky position. While astronomers do not know its precise distance, they think the object resides about 20,000 to 30,000 light-years away in the galaxy's inner region. Ground-based observatories have detected infrared and radio emissions from Swift J1745-26, but thick clouds of obscuring dust have prevented astronomers from catching Swift J1745-26 in visible light. Swift J1745-26 must be a member of a low-mass

X-ray binary X-ray binaries are a class of binary stars that are luminous in X-rays. The X-rays are produced by matter falling from one component, called the ''donor'' (usually a relatively common main sequence star), to the other component, called the ''acc ...

(LMXB) system, which includes a normal,

sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

-like star.

References

Stellar black holes Sagittarius (constellation) Articles containing video clips {{black-hole-stub