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Originally Posted by Millie  I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that no one has ever actually observed a black hole. It's a theoretical object that we basically know exists, and we know there's one at the center of our galaxy, but we've never seen or observed it directly. So if the announcement is about a black hole, or especially the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, it's a very impressive finding. It would prove correct a lot of our theories about the galaxy and the universe, and if Hawking radiation is observed, would earn Stephen Hawking a Nobel Prize. |
You can't observe a black hole, because of their very nature. You can however observe their effects on their surroundings, such as jets of material shooting out of them, huge amounts of X-rays (which is what Chandra observes), that kind of thing. We've observed that kind of thing tons. Regular old black holes are pretty old hat at this point.
They know exactly where the main blackhole in our galaxy is. And indeed, they've observed thousands of other galaxies' supermassive blackholes.
But again, stars don't automatically always end up as black holes. They can end up brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, magnetars, pulars, there's dozens of unique and interesting things they can end up. My bet is on them having found something like that, some unique and extremely rare post-main phase star.