A very small number of active black holes have been discovered so far. “It glows brightly in X-rays because it consumes material from the closest companion star,” which is very far away.
A new record was set this Friday when the closest black hole to Earth was discovered. Her name is Gaia BH1 and she is asleep. It is 10 times more massive than the Sun and is located about 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.
This discovery was made by the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii. It is one of the sister telescopes of the Gemini International Observatory, operated by NSF NOIRLab.
“Take the solar system, put the black hole where the sun is, and the sun is where the Earth is, and you have this system,” explains Karim El-Badri, an astrophysicist at the Astrophysical Center. Harvard, the Smithsonian and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, lead authors of the paper, said in a statement.
While there have been many claimed discoveries about such systems, nearly all of these discoveries have since been debunked. This is the first unambiguous discovery of a sun-like star in a large orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy.”
The article was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Gaia of the European Space Agency has photographed the erratic behavior in the motion of stars. Al-Badri and his team studied this in detail with Gemini North’s Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph, which “measures the velocity of a companion star as it orbits the black hole and provides accurate measurements of its orbital period,” according to the communicated.
A wobble in the position of the observed stars is caused by a heavy sleeping black hole, weighing about 10 solar masses.
Al-Badri explains that “our observations of the Gemini follow-up confirm without a shadow of a doubt that the binary contains one ordinary star and at least one dormant black hole.” “We were unable to find a plausible astrophysical scenario that could explain the observed orbits of a system that does not include at least one black hole.”
Currently, astronomical models of the evolution of binary systems cannot explain the “strange” configuration of the Gaia BH1 system.
“Interestingly, this system cannot be easily adapted from the standard binary evolutionary model,” concluded Al-Badri. “This raises a lot of questions about how this binary formed, as well as how many black holes are hiding there.”
