10Times larger than the sun ... the discovery of the closest black hole to Earth
Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, 1,600 light-years away. It is the first unambiguous discovery of a dormant black hole in the Milky Way.
According to scientists, this black hole is ten times larger than the sun, which is three times closer than the previous record holder, according to what was published by USA Today.
The hole was discovered by observing the movement of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at approximately the same distance as the Earth orbits the sun.
A research paper published last week in the peer-reviewed Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices details the discovery of a "sun-like star orbiting a dark object."
The team of researchers initially identified the black hole using the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, according to a press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
According to the team, the hole, called BH1 Gaia, is a dormant black hole about 10 times the mass of the Sun and located about 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.
The researchers then made 39 additional observations using six different telescopes around the world over a four-month period. When using a telescope in Hawaii operated by the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, the team was able to confirm that the central dark object was a complete black hole.
“Take the solar system, put a black hole where the sun is, and the sun where the Earth is, and you have this system,” Karim El-Badri, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in a statement. .
He explained, "This is the first unambiguous discovery of a sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy."
Researchers do not know how the binary system, which consists of a star orbiting a black hole in the Milky Way, formed, but they noted that the discovery of "Gaia BH1" indicates the presence of a large number of dormant black holes in the binaries.
Astronomers estimate that there are 100 million black holes in our galaxy, but only a few have been confirmed so far.
?But what are black holes
According to the site, black holes are the most extreme objects in the universe, supermassive versions of these unimaginably dense objects are believed to be found at the centers of all large galaxies.
Stellar-mass black holes, which weigh approximately five to 100 times the mass of the Sun, are the most common, with an estimated 100 million stellar black holes in the Milky Way alone.
However, only a few of them have been discovered so far, and nearly all of them are active, which means they shine brightly in X-rays as they consume material from a nearby companion star, unlike latent black holes that do not.
source:Websites