Closest black hole to Earth found only 1600 light years away, about 3000 light years closer than any known black hole
It is said that there are about 100 million
Sun-like star orbiting a black hole | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Oxford Academic
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac3140
Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth | NOIRLab
https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2227/
The black hole discovered this time is named ' Gaia BH1 ', has about 10 times the mass of the Sun, and is located near the constellation Ophiuchus . Gaia BH1 is said to be about 1,600 light-years away from Earth, which is about one-third the distance from Earth's closest object, X-1 Monoceros, which is about 4,700 light-years away. located in close proximity.
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An active black hole absorbs matter from a nearby star, generates heat, and emits powerful X-rays and jets. On the other hand, Gaia BH1, which was discovered this time, is a 'dormant' black hole with no energy sources around it to absorb. Dormant black holes such as Gaia BH1 are difficult to observe because they do not emit X-rays and blend into their surroundings.
Gaia BH1 was successfully observed by a team represented by Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. El-Badry's research team first analyzed data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia probe and identified the possible presence of a black hole in this binary star. The analyzed data captured the irregular movement of the star, which seems to have been caused by the gravity of the 'invisible huge celestial body'.
Next, the research team used the multi-object spectroscope mounted on the Gemini Observatory to observe in detail the orbits of stars orbiting a celestial body believed to be a black hole at about the same distance that the earth orbits the sun. . As a result, they discovered that the invisible celestial body at the center of this binary star is a black hole with a mass about 10 times that of the Sun.
The progenitor star of Gaia BH1 is thought to have been at least 20 times more massive than our Sun and to have lived only a few million years. If these binary stars were formed at the same time, it is thought that one star would expand and swallow the other, making it difficult to explain the mechanism by which the binary stars formed with existing models. thing. This discovery indicates a gap in our understanding of the formation and evolution of black holes in binary systems, and suggests the existence of unknown dormant black hole populations in binary systems.
``It raises a lot of questions about how this binary star formed and how many such dormant black holes exist in the universe,'' El-Badry said. .
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