Gaia BH1 has a mass of 10 solar masses and orbits together with a Sun-like star in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus
In astronomical terms very close. actually Gaia BH1 is located 1,560 light-years from Earth (about 15 million billion kilometers), but the closest black hole to us ever discovered. The news had already appeared in mid-September in the scientific community, but only now has it been confirmed with the study published in the specialized journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
. The black hole is in the direction of constellation Ophiuchushas a mass about ten times that of the Sun and orbits in a binary system in which the other object is a Sun-like star orbiting the black hole at a distance comparable to that of the Earth from our star.
The discovery
The discovery was made with the Gaia space telescope, a European mission launched in December 2013, and with the Gemini North telescope located in Hawaii. Gaia BH1 is about three times closer to us than the previous black hole that held the record. It’s a strange black hole, a quiescent black hole, says the study’s first signatory, Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. This system does not fit easily into standard models of binary evolution. It raises many questions about how it formed and how many dormant black holes are out there. The very distance of the companion star, similar to our Sun, another oddity of Gaia BH1.
November 4, 2022 (change November 4, 2022 | 21:04)
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