Astronomers have found a new black hole in the Milky Way galaxy very near to Earth. This is the closest black hole to earth ever discovered. It is only some 1600 light years away from the Earth.
The newly discovered black hole is named Gaia BH1 and its located in the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer. This black hole is ten times more massive than our sun and it is three times nearer to the earth than the previously discovered one.
It was initially identified using the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft while observing the star motion of its companion star. its star rotates around it at the same distance as the earth from the sun.
This black hole was discovered by Kareem El-Badry from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and his team. El-Badri and his team confirmed their findings working at the International Gemini Observatory in Hawaii.
Black holes are massive objects in the universe, and scientists believe that supermassive versions of the black holes are present at the centers of all large galaxies.
According to an estimate, there are about 100 million black holes in the milky way galaxy and each of them weighs approximately five to hundred times the mass of the sun. However, only a few black holes have been discovered yet. All the black holes discovered to date are active.
A black hole being active means that it utilizes material from a nearby companion and shines brightly in x-rays while a dormant black hole does not.
“Take the Solar System, put a black hole where the Sun is, and the Sun where the Earth is, and you get this system,” explained Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and the lead author of the paper describing this discovery that was published on November 2 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“While there have been many claimed detections of systems like this, almost all these discoveries have subsequently been refuted. This is the first unambiguous detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our Galaxy.”
“I’ve been searching for dormant black holes for the last four years using a wide range of datasets and methods,” said El-Badry. “My previous attempts — as well as those of others — turned up a menagerie of binary systems that masquerade as black holes, but this is the first time the search has borne fruit.”
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