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Astronomers Find a Black Hole in Our Cosmic Back Yard


Almost but not true for Halloween, astronomers announced on Friday that they have discovered nearest known black hole. It is massive, an empty shell 10 times the size of the sun, orbiting as far away from its own star as our Earth.

Don’t worry, though: This black hole is 1,600 light-years away, in the constellation Ophiuchus; The next closest known black hole is about 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. What sets this new black hole apart from the thousands of other black holes that have been identified in our Milky Way, besides its proximity, is that it doesn’t do anything – it doesn’t drag the nearby star to the spot. perish, do not consume gravity everything around. Rather, the black hole is dormant, a silent killer waiting for the spatial currents to feed it.

Black holes are objects so dense that, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, not even light can escape them. This makes them some of the most fascinating and violent phenomena in nature; As they feed, they can become the most luminous objects in the universe, as gas, dust, and even smaller stars are ripped apart and heated to glow, spewing energy as they approach. eternal gate.

Almost every galaxy has a supermassive black hole millions of billions of times more massive than the sun; Scientists aren’t sure where they come from. Smaller black holes are thought to form from massive stars that have reached the end of their fusion lifecycle and collapsed. There are probably millions of black holes in the Milky Way. They are commonly known by the X-rays they eject when separating gas from their companions in binary star systems.

But what about the dormant holes, the ones that don’t currently cough up fire? Kareem el-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has been searching for such hidden demons for four years. He found this black hole by scrutinizing data from the European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, which has been tracking with high precision for position, motion and other properties. of millions of stars in the Milky Way.

Dr el-Badry and his team discovered a star, virtually identical to our sun, that is undulating in an eerie way, as if under the gravitational influence of an infinite companion Figure. To investigate further, the researchers commanded the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which can measure the speed and period of this oscillation and thus determine the relative masses of the objects. may be related. The technique is similar to the process by which astronomers analyze the oscillations of stars to detect the presence of extra-orbital planets – except this time the quarry is much larger.

Their results and subsequent calculations were consistent with a black hole 10 times the mass of the Sun orbited by a star similar to our own. They named it Gaia BH1.

“Take the solar system, put a black hole where the sun is and the sun is where the Earth is, and you get this system,” said Dr. el-Badry said in a news release from the National Optical and Infrared Laboratory, which operates the Gemini North Telescope.

“This is the closest known black hole with a factor of 3, and its discovery suggests the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in binaries,” he and his co-authors write. he and his co-authors write in a piece of paper published Wednesday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers say the new discovery has questioned their supposed knowledge of how such binary star systems develop. The precursor to this black hole must be a star about 20 times the mass of the Sun. According to leading theories, the star’s death and subsequent black hole formation would involve a supernova explosion and other processes that would severely disrupt another, smaller star in the system. . So why does the other star appear so ordinary?

“It raises many questions about how this binary system was formed, as well as how many dormant black holes are out there,” Dr el-Badry said in the press release.

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