Earlier this month astronomers using the Chandra X-ray telescope discovered evidence of the youngest black hole ever found. Back in 1979, an amateur astronomer by the name Gus Johnson found a very bright star, that turned out to be a supernova, SN1979C. Now thirty years later, it seems it has become a black hole. This is the youngest black hole in our neighborhood (even though it's 50 million LY away in the galaxy M100!) There is even evidence that it has been feeding for the last 3 decades, based on a large amount of X rays emanating from the site, possibly on it's binary companion or material left over from the supernova itself.

More information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1979C

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/H-10-299.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photoH- 10-299.html

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700082963/Md-stargazers-d iscovery-keeps-on-giving.html

Possibly the coolest thing about this, if you read the bottom of 1st page in the last article, Gus Johnson (the supernova's original discoverer) was first turned on to space exploration by an image of Mars shown from one of it's moons, which he found in an old encyclopedia when he was 6! Just think, that's the kind of impact we can have on people.

Frist of all, that's really cool that something that new was found and that people got to see the transformation from supernova to blackhole. We may never see something like that again in a LONG time.

Second, I think it's awesome that a space artist had an impact on a young child that led to this kind of discovery. It's nice to know that we don't just make things that look pretty but that we can also have an effect on people that can change lives!

Yep, that is neat to see the transformation in our life time.

Black holes, to me, are very interesting.  However,  I cannot believe in a black hole having inifinite mass and zero volume even though math proves it.   Here is why, if a black hole has inifinite mass it would have all the mass in the universe plus one (as far as I know, there might have been time in which that was the case.  Somewhere around 14.5 Billion years ago-plus or minus a few billion) called the Big Bang.

Scientists have stated that there are tiny, small, medium and whopper black holes and EACH ONE has inifinite mass.  I would agree that the mass of each black hole is quite a lot and that the volume of the mass is quite low.  How ever a black hole does have both.  The math equations are WRONG (IMVHASO) especially when you get into that realm.  This of course comes from a guy who almost flunked calculus and had to drop the course before it counted.  Jan 

You've misinterpreted what they're saying - black holes don't have infinite mass. The mass is packed into an infinitely small (essentially zero) volume, and since density is mass over volume, that means it's the density that is infinite and not the mass!

Black Hole masses are very finite though - they can potentially be anywhere from barely above zero kilograms (in which case it's atomic scale and evaporates really quickly) to billions of suns (as in the supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies).

To make a black hole, you need to collapse the object down to a size smaller its Schwarzschild radius - once it gets to that point, light can't escape it, and gravity continues to collapse it from there into a black hole. For Earth, that radius is about 9 millimetres (say, the size of a pea) - if you do that, you end up with a black hole that has a mass of 1 earth mass.