?How far is the closest black hole to Earth
Until now, the black hole in question was about 480 parsecs – or 1565 light years – from the solar system. It was Gaia BH1, a binary star-black hole system discovered in April 2004 by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. But according to Stefano Tormienti, post-doctoral student at the University of Padua, there is much closer!
With a team of international scientists, he chose to look toward an open cluster – a group of hundreds of stars that are loosely bound together and share common properties like their age and chemical characteristics. Previously, research into black holes was limited to old (more than 10 billion years old) and massive (more than 10,000 solar masses) star clusters located in the Milky Way halo.
The young clusters of the galactic disk were shunned due to the difficulty of adapting analysis methods to them. The ESA (European Space Agency) Gaia satellite, launched in December 2013, made it possible for the first time to accurately record the positions and velocities of the different members of open clusters.
Stefano Tormienti's team therefore took the opportunity to compare its simulations of density profiles based on the movement and evolution of the Hyades stars to data from Gaia. Result: the model best corresponding to the observations suggests the existence of two or even three black holes. However, the Hyades are “only” 45 parsecs from Earth, or barely 151 light years! This duo-trio would reduce the distance to the first black hole by more than ten times…
Source: websites