THAT’S STELLAR!

Black-hole star 70x size of sun

Hole-y moley! Scientists have discovered a monster black hole that is so huge, they say it shouldn’t even exist.

Experts had long believed that the stellar bodies — formed when massive stars explode and collapse — in our galaxy were never larger than 20 times the size of the sun.

But a team of scientists in China found a cosmic colossus estimated to be at least 70 times bigger, according to a study published in the latest issue of Nature.

“Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” said National Astronomical Observatory of China researcher Liu Jifeng in a statement.

Located 15,000 light-years from Earth, the behemoth black hole has been christened “LB-1” by its discoverers.

“LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible,” Jifeng said.

“Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation.”

The scientist said LB-1’s discovery has blown long-standing assumptions about the Milky Way’s formation to pieces. “We thought that very massive stars with the chemical composition typical of our galaxy must shed most of their gas in powerful stellar winds as they approach the end of their life,” Jifeng said.

“Therefore, they should not leave behind such a massive remnant.”

Jifeng’s researchers zeroed in on LB-1 with China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope, which looks for the “one out of a thousand stars” orbiting an invisible object’s gravitational pull.

After their initial discovery, the world’s largest optical telescopes — Spain’s 34-foot-wide Gran Telescopio Canarias and the 32-foot-wide Keck I telescope in the US — were activated to pinpoint the system’s measurements.

The results were stunning: a star eight times heavier than the sun was spotted orbiting a “70-solar-mass black hole,” according to the report.