Black holes, the universe’s big bad villains that don’t even let light pass through, are closer than we thought. Astronomers have discovered the closest-known black hole to Earth, which is of stellar mass and has quickly become a target for understanding the evolution of these extreme objects.
This is the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way, which makes it even more intriguing. Stellar-mass black holes, which weigh five to one hundred times the mass of the Sun, are much more common, with an estimated 100 million in the Milky Way alone.
The findings were published in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices.
The closest black hole to Earth is about ten times the mass of the Sun and is located about 1600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, making it three times closer to Earth than the previous record holder, an X-ray binary in the constellation Monoceros.
Astronomers observed the motion of the black hole’s companion, a Sun-like star that orbits the black hole at roughly the same distance as the Earth orbits the Sun, using the Gemini North telescope on Hawai’i, one of the twin telescopes of the International Gemini Observatory.
‘Take the Solar System, put a black hole where the Sun is, and the Sun where the Earth is, and you get this system. 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,’ explained astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry, lead author of the paper.
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