Our Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to contain 100 million stellar black holes – cosmic bodies formed by the collapse of massive stars and so dense even light can’t escape. Until now, scientists had estimated the mass of an individual stellar black hole in our Galaxy at no more than 20 times that of the Sun. But the discovery of a huge black hole by a Chinese-led team of international scientists has toppled that assumption.

Based on data from the National Major Scientific Infrastructure LAMOST and the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, the research team revealed the spatial structural evolution of the ancient Galactic disk, discovering that the oldest surviving structural component of the Galactic disk originated approximately 13.5 billion years ago.

In the vast and diverse Universe, the initial mass distribution at the birth of a new population of stars determines the fate of galaxies. This relationship is described by the Initial Mass Function (IMF). For more than half a century, astronomers have assumed that the IMF is a universal relationship, i.e., it is uniform throughout the Universe.

A new study led by Prof. ZHAO Gang from the NAOC has identified a chemically peculiar star (LAMOST J1010+2358) in the Galactic halo as clear evidence of the existence of PISNe from very massive first stars in the early Universe, based on the LAMOST survey and follow up high resolution spectra observation by Subaru Telescope. It has been confirmed that this star was formed in the gas cloud dominated by the yields of a PISN with 260 solar masses.

A Chinese research team led by Dr. HUANG Yang, an associate Professor from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) & University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), pioneered the "Motion picture" method for measuring the precession rate of the Milky Way's disk warp.

Chinese researchers have discovered a promising mass-gap black hole using the radial velocity and astrometry methods. The study has been published online in Nature Astronomy on Sept. 10, and was conducted by a team led by Dr. WANG Song, an associate researcher from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).