A scientist has calculated the number of black holes in the Milky Way

There may be about 100 million stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way, but humanity has been able to confirm the existence of only a few dozen such objects. This was announced on September 18 by Vyacheslav Avdeev, a researcher at the Astrocosmic Center of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"It is estimated that there may be about 100 million stellar-mass black holes in our galaxy. There are about 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and now there are 100 million black holes. In fact, we know of several dozen, maybe 50 stellar—mass black holes," he told "RIA Novosti".

Stellar-mass black holes are objects with a mass of three to several hundred solar masses. According to the scientist, this is the most common type of black hole. The estimate of their number is based on data on the birth of massive stars and the probability of their transformation into black holes rather than neutron stars.

In addition to stellar-mass black holes, there is a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Such objects are found in about every galaxy, although in rare cases there may be galaxies without them. As an example, the scientist cited the M33 galaxy closest to Earth.

The expert explained that stellar-mass black holes form at the final stage of the life of massive stars. The origin of supermassive black holes remains the subject of scientific research. According to existing hypotheses, they could have formed in the early Universe due to the presence of initial nuclei or accelerated accumulation of matter due to special processes of gas accretion.

Scientists have found a way to detect the black holes of the first stars

In July, it was reported that astronomers had discovered the first confirmed stellar-mass black hole in the globular cluster Omega Centauri. The find is located about 18,000 light-years from Earth and includes about 10 million gravitationally bound stars. Models show that there may be approximately 10,000 stellar-mass black holes in the cluster, but so far none of them have been reliably detected.