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WASHINGTON – NASA scientists have discovered a black hole, the smallest ever found that weighs approximately four times the mass of our sun and it is 15 miles in diameter.

“This black hole is actually pushing the limits,” said Nikolai Shaposhnikov, the study team leader of NASA. “Scientists were working hard for many years to find out the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this invention is a big step towards answering that question,” he said in a statement.

Though it is smaller, it seems to be stronger than other larger black holes found at the centers of galaxies. If anyone goes nearer to J1650 (the name given to the black hole), its gravity would stretch your body into a “strand of spaghetti,” said Shaposhnikov.

This small black hole was once a star that has exhausted all its fuel and it eventually collapsed and shut down due to its own gravity.

This small black hole is situated in the XTE J1650-500 binary system of the constellation Ara of our Milky Way galaxy. With the help of NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite, Shaposhnikov and his colleague Lev Titarchuk found out a new method to estimate the size of the black hole.

“Based on the equations of Albert Einstein, a black hole having 3.8 times the mass of our Sun would be only 15 miles in diameter,” NASA said.”The invention of this new black hole makes the smallest object ever discovered outside our solar system,” said Shaposhnikov.

The smallest black hole which was identified earlier was GRO 1655-40, which weighs approximately 6.3 times the mass of the Sun.

A collapsed star smaller than J1650, would likely to form a neutron star and not a black hole, said the scientists.

Black holes can’t be seen and they’re identified by observing the activities taking place around them. Astronomers weigh the mass of black holes by using a relationship between the apparent size of the black hole and the X-rays emitted by the inundation of gas that twirl’s into the black hole’s disk from its neighboring star.

As the gas piles up near the black hole, it “becomes very dense and congested,” said Shaposhnikov in a press conference. “Therefore the matter cannot easily enter it has to squeeze into the black hole.”

Since the matter is squeezed, the gas gets heated up and emits X-rays.“This new invention is a big milestone for us that bring us much closer to the theoretically calculated limit,” said Shaposhnikov.

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