Gemini International Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA
News from the NOS•
A new record in the ranking of black holes: astronomers have discovered one located “only” 1560 light years from Earth. It is twice as close as any other known black hole.
Black holes are places in space from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Most black holes are the remnants of a mega star explosion. There are about 100 million in the Milky Way galaxy alone, of which our solar system is a part, but only a handful have been confirmed.
The newly discovered black hole is therefore the closest, 1560 light years on the scale of our Milky Way (105,000 light years on average) and is about our cosmic courtyard. But this is relative: a spaceship with current technology would still take more than 30 million years fly there.
The black hole, Gaia BH1, was found with the Gemini Observatory, an observatory consisting of two large reflecting telescopes, one in Hawaii and one in Chile. The dark celestial body was discovered because it is not alone. Gaia BH1 has a partner: a star that is as far from the black hole as the Earth is from the sun. And this is special, the discoverers say. “Take our solar system and place a black hole where our sun is and a star where our Earth is, and you get this system,” explains astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry.
supermassive black hole
There have been previous claims by astronomers who thought they had found such a system, but those findings have been repeatedly disproved. El-Badry: “This is the first undisputed observation of a sun-like star orbiting a black hole in our galaxy, the Milky Way.”
Gaia BH1 is a smaller black hole, a so-called stellar mass black hole, a stellar black hole. They can have a mass that is at most a few tens of times greater than that of the sun. Besides, there are also supermassive black holes, and they can have a mass millions of times greater than that of the sun. Such a supermassive black hole, for example, lies at the center of the Milky Way.
Using a network of radio telescopes around the world, astronomers were able to photograph that black hole this year:
EHT Collaboration
