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To date, a very limited number of active black holes have been found. They “glow brightly in X‑rays while consuming material from a nearby stellar companion” and are very distant.
A new record was set this Friday when the closest black hole to Earth was discovered. It is called Gaia BH1 and is dormant. Ten times more massive than the Sun, it is located about 1,600 light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus.
The discovery was made by the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii. It is one of the International Gemini Observatory’s twin telescopes, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab.
“Take the solar system, put a black hole where the sun is and the sun where the earth is, and you get that system,” explained Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the paper’s lead author in a statement.
“While there have been many claimed discoveries of such systems, almost all of these discoveries have subsequently been disproved. This is the first clear detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy.”
The article will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia showed erratic behavior in the star’s motion. El-Badry and his team studied it in detail through the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph instrument on Gemini North, which “measured the speed of the companion star as it orbited the black hole and provided an accurate measurement of its orbital period.” for release.
A wobble was detected in the star’s position, caused by a heavy resting black hole weighing about 10 solar masses.
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“Our follow-up observations of Gemini unequivocally confirmed that the binary contains a normal star and at least one dormant black hole,” explained El-Badry. “We could not find any plausible astrophysical scenario that could explain the observed orbit of the system that does not involve at least one black hole.”
Currently, astronomers’ models of the evolution of binary systems cannot explain the “peculiar” configuration of the Gaia BH1 system.
“Interestingly, this system does not easily integrate into standard binary evolution models,” concluded El-Badry. “It raises a lot of questions about how this binary system came about and how many of these dormant black holes are out there.”