Find the black hole closest to Earth

Observing a black hole is not simple, so scientists working at the Southern European Observatory (ESO) in Chile had to use the inference method based on the motion of nearby stars to find the hole. new black.

The team tried to find the key in the strange orbits of two stars close together in the space of a system called HR 6819. Both are in the same system and have mass and dimensions. They are similar, but they work differently. One of the two stars is rotating so fast, that it is almost far apart.

Thomas Rivinius, an ESO scientist who led the research, said that the remaining star didn’t spin much.

For many years, astronomers were very curious about this two-star system. Some researchers think of a third object that must be nearby causing the two stars to move like them.

And until recently, after years of speculation, Rivinius and his team decided to take a different look. They track the movements of the stars and measure how they wobble in space.

Researchers have realized that stars appear to be orbiting something else, an object that is four times larger than our Sun. But at first glance, it seems there is nothing at the heart of this system. That means it’s either orbiting a super hard-to-see star or it’s an invisible black hole.

To narrow the choices, Rivinius and his team found the faintest star that could exist with that mass but ultimately couldn’t find any trace of such a dark object.

“We can rule out any type of star with that mass at the moment. So if there’s something with that mass in the system, it’s got to be a black hole, ”Rivinius said.

This system is close enough to Earth so that stars near the black holes are visible to the naked eye. But the fact that 1,000 light-years is still a huge gap and this black hole is not dangerous to the Earth.

The black hole in this system is smaller than some of the other holes that exist in the universe. The supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy is thought to be 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun, about 26,000 light-years away.

“Finding a black hole very close to Earth means that there may be even smaller black holes throughout our universe and even our galaxy. We only know a few dozen black holes, but we suspect there may be another billion black holes in the galaxy, ”Rivinius said.