The discovery of a giant black hole in the “backyard” of our solar system
The discovery of a giant black hole in the “backyard” of our solar system
A research team led by scientists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA, has succeeded in discovering the closest known black hole to Earth, which the researchers described in a university press release issued on October 19, as it is located “in the backyard of our solar system.”
Black holes are the final stage of the life of giant stars, and equal to more than 8-10 times the mass of the sun, where the equilibrium between gravitational forces and the energy emanating from nuclear interactions in the interior of stars of this type is broken, and then they explode in a fraction of a second, releasing their substance In the center of this type of explosion, massive stars leave black holes.
Black holes acquire their strange nature from their enormous ability to attract, so that they are able to attract the same ray of light if it falls in captivity, and so they appear in the images captured by them as a black void surrounded by a huge amount of matter that revolves around it.
A newly discovered black hole next to a star (University of Alabama, Huntsville)
Gaia data
According to the study written by this team, and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, they used data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory, which aims to compile a three-dimensional list of nearly a billion celestial bodies.
The team aimed to search, among these data, for binary stars, in which two stars orbit each other. Then he used spectroscopic techniques to search for binaries whose brightness indicates the presence of only one star, while the mass indicators indicate the presence of something else next to this star. This means that one of the two stars has turned into a black hole and its brightness has disappeared, but the trace of its mass is still present.
According to the study, the final observations revealed a body that runs in a long orbit of 185 days, and is only 1,550 light-years away from us, that it fully agrees with the criteria of black holes, and it was also found that its mass is 12 times the mass of the sun.
Black holes are like a black void surrounded by a huge amount of matter revolving around them (websites)
To understand how close this distance is, we can consider one of the stars that you can see with your eyes, which is the hen Deneb, which is located at a distance of approximately 2500 light years, while the weight star Wezen from the constellation of the Great Dog is located at a distance of 1600 light years, which is also visible to the naked eye. .
Researchers have estimated that there are a million cases similar to those they studied, in which there is a black hole orbiting a bright star, which gives scientists a better chance of finding black holes in the vicinity of the sun, and who knows? Perhaps one day we will discover a black hole closer to Earth than this.
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