Mini-black hole is smallest ever but still strong

An artist's impression of the lowest-mass known black hole belonging to a binary system named XTE J1650-500. The black hole has about 3.8 times the mass of our sun, and is orbited by a companion star.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA scientists have identified the smallest black hole ever found -- less than four times the mass of our sun and about the size of a large city.

But the mini-black hole, dubbed J1650, could still stretch a person into a "strand of spaghetti" with its pull, the researchers told a meeting in Los Angeles.

"This black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question," Nikolai Shaposhnikov of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. full story