finding the black hole closest to Earth
The closest known black hole to Earth has been found by astronomers using the Gemini International Observatory, operated by the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab.
A stellar-mass inert black hole has been confirmed for the first time in the Milky Way. With only 1,600 light-years between it and Earth, it is a fascinating topic of research to improve our knowledge of the development of binary systems.
black holes
The most extreme things in the universe are black holes. All massive galaxies are supposed to contain supermassive versions of these dense objects.
There are an estimated 100 million stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way alone and they are significantly more diffuse and weigh between five and a hundred times the weight of the Sun. Unlike inert black holes, which do not flash strongly in X-rays because they consume material from a nearby star, only a few have been confirmed so far and nearly all are "active".
The closest black hole to Earth
Astronomers have named the closest black hole to Earth Gaia BH1 using the Gemini North telescope on the island of Hawaii and one of the twin telescopes of the Gemini International Observatory, operated by NSF's NOIRLab.
It is three times closer to Earth than the previous record holder. This dormant black hole is about 10 times the size of the Sun and is located about 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Brilliant studies of the motion of the black hole partner, a sun-like star orbiting the black hole at about the same distance as the Earth orbits the sun, have allowed for this new discovery.
"Take the solar system, put a black hole where the sun and the sun are where the Earth is and you get that system," explains Karim El-Badri, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the paper describing this discovery.
"Although there have been many claimed discoveries of such systems, almost all of them have subsequently been refuted. This is the first unequivocal discovery of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy."
stellar mass black holes
A few stellar-mass black holes that have been found have been detected through their active interactions with a companion star, despite the fact that there are probably millions of them roaming the Milky Way . Extremely hot material from a nearby star spirals toward the black hole, where it produces intense X-rays and jets of matter. When a black hole is dormant (i.e. not actively feeding), it simply merges with its surroundings.
“I have been searching for dormant black holes for the past four years using a wide range of datasets and methods,” Al-Badri said. The research will bear fruit.
Data from the European Space Agency's GIA spacecraft was initially examined by researchers to determine the system's possible presence of a black hole. Gaia captured the small deviations in the star's velocity caused by a massive, invisible object.
The unique composition of the Gaia BH1 system is difficult to explain using astronomers' current concepts of the evolution of binary systems. The progenitor star, which later evolved into the newly discovered black hole, had a mass of at least 20 times that of the Sun.
It would have had a lifespan as short as a few million years. If both stars formed simultaneously, this massive star would rapidly evolve into a giant star, bulging and swallowing the second star before it had a chance to evolve into a suitable main-sequence star like our sun, which burns hydrogen.
It's not at all clear how a solar-mass star could survive that ring and end up as a seemingly normal star, as the binary black hole observations suggest. All theoretical models that allow for survival predict that the solar-mass star should have ended up in a tighter orbit than is actually observed.
This may indicate that there are important gaps in our understanding of how black holes form and evolve in binary systems, as well as the existence of an as-yet-unexplored group of dormant black holes in binaries.
"It is interesting that this system cannot be easily adapted by standard binary evolution models, it raises many questions about how
binary system formed, as well as how many lurking black holes are there," Al-Badri concluded. [1]
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