Astronomers discovered a Black Hole which is close to Earth. It was the first clear detection of a stellar-mass region of spacetime close to our planet. What made this discovery possible was a telescope located in Hawaii, in the United States. See more on the subject below.
Discovery of a black hole near Earth
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A group of astronomers operating the Gemini North telescope noticed that the black hole is closer to Earth compared to its last position.
It is located only 1600 light-years away and, according to the NOIRlab research center of the National Science Foundation (NSF, acronym in English), and the AURA Observatory, apparently this is the first possible discovery of a stellar-mass black hole in Via Milky.
Gaia BH1
According to the researchers, named as Gaia BH1, it is an inactive black hole, which weighs 5 to 10 times more than the Sun and is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus.
It is not yet known for sure how it was initially formed. After all, these astronomical objects are the junction of a binary system of stars, in which one of them ended up becoming a superstar, which later became a black hole.
However, one thing caught the researchers' attention: the fact that its companion star survived this episode. Astronomers hypothesized that "the solar-mass star must be in a much tighter orbit than actually observed."
Astronomers said the discovery of Gaia BH1 could indicate that there are certain "gaps" in the formation of black holes in a binary star system.
How did the discovery of Gaia BH1 happen?
NOIRLab drew attention to the fact that the discovery of Gaia BH1 was only possible thanks to precise observations of the movement of the companion star in that region of space. This star has similarities to the Sun and orbits at a distance similar to the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
The statement made by NOIRLab said: “The original star, which later became this black hole, should have been at least 20 times more massive than our Sun. That means she would have only lived a few million years.”
Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, explained further on the matter:
“While there are many detections of systems like this, almost all of these findings have now been disproved. Instead, this is the first unambiguous detection of a solar-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy."
