Black holes come in a variety of sizes, from stellar black holes a few times the mass of the Sun to supermassive black holes, millions of times more massive than the Sun and at the heart of galaxies.
Astronomers recently discovered a supermassive black hole only 1,550 light-years away, and it is astronomically close to our home. It is one of the closest black holes ever discovered, with a mass 12 times the mass of the sun being so close to us, it is an exciting target for future research.
“It’s closer to the sun than any other known black hole, at a distance of 1,550 light-years,” Sokanya Chakrabarti, lead author of the study from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said in a statement. “So it’s practically in our backyard.” As reported by Engadget.
The black hole was discovered using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which is building a 3D map of the entire galaxy.
The researchers studied nearly 200,000 binary stars, in which a star orbits a companion, to look for cases in which the brightness of a single star is sufficient to explain the brightness of the binary.
This means that the companion in these binaries must be dark, indicating that the companion could be a black hole.
The researchers then took these selected binaries and studied the Doppler shift of their light, which shows how massive the companion is and gives information about the pair’s orbit and rotation.
This is how they identified and learned about the nearby black hole.
“In this case we’re looking at a monster black hole, but it’s in a long orbit of 185 days, or about half a year,” Chakrabarti said. “It’s very far from the visible star and not making any progress toward it.”
Black hole