Black holes are even stranger than you can imagine

Our love of black holes continues to grow as our knowledge of these celestial bodies expands. The latest news is the discovery of a rare "middleweight" black hole, a relative newcomer to the black hole family. We already knew that some black holes are just a few times the mass of our Sun, while others are more than a billion times as massive. But others with intermediate masses, such as the one 2,200 times the mass of our Sun recently discovered in the star cluster 47 Tucanae, are surprisingly elusive. So what is it about black holes, these gravitational prisons that trap anything that gets too close to them, that captures the imagination of people of all ages and professions?