But what about the dorms, the ones that aren’t currently coughing up fire? Karim El-Badri, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has been searching for such hidden demons for four years. He found this black hole by examining data from the European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, which tracked the positions, movements and other properties of millions of stars in the Milky Way with pinpoint accuracy.
Al-Badri and his team discovered a star, almost identical to our sun, that vibrated strangely, as if under the influence of gravity from an invisible companion. For further research, the researchers acquired the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which can measure the speed and period of this oscillation to determine the relative masses of the objects in question. The technique is similar to the process by which astronomers analyze the wobble of stars to detect the presence of exoplanets orbiting the solar system, except this time the quarry was much larger.
Their results and subsequent calculations matched a black hole with 10 solar masses, surrounded by a star similar to ours. They called him Gaia BH1.
“Take the solar system, put a black hole where the sun is and the sun where the earth is, and you get that system,” says Dr. full moon He said in a press release: From the National Optical and Infrared Laboratory, which operates the Gemini North Telescope.
He and his colleagues wrote: “This is the closest known triple black hole and his discovery indicates that there are a large number of dormant black holes in binary stars.” on paper Published Wednesday in the Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices. Astronomers said the new discovery raised questions about their supposed knowledge of the evolution of binary star systems. The precursor of this black hole must have been a star of about 20 solar masses. Leading theories suggest that the star’s death and subsequent black hole formation would have triggered a supernova explosion and other processes that would severely disrupt the system’s other smaller star. So why does the other star appear naturally?
