Black holes are very attractive and powerful and are known for their very strong gravitational pulls that even light cannot escape. Now scientists have discovered the closest black hole to the earth Gaia BH1 It is called
Gaia BH1 is a dormant black hole that has 10 times the mass of our Sun and is located 1,600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. The team that discovered this black hole says it is three times closer to Earth than the previous closest option, a black hole in the constellation Monoceros. Gaia BH1 is so close to us that the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab Astronomy Center calls it “our cosmic backyard.”
Steps to discover the black hole closest to the earth
It all started with the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, which is cataloging the stars of our Milky Way galaxy. Searching for its data, researchers found a star very similar to the Sun that has distinct wobbles that indicate something is orbiting it.
Then the researchers noticed this sleeping black hole by carefully examining the star and the object that revolves around it with the Gemini North telescope.
“Karim Al Badari”, astrophysicist, said in the statement of NOIRLab:
“While there have been many claims to identify systems like this, almost all of them have been disproved. “This is the first unequivocal detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy.”
Dormant black holes are hard to detect because they don’t produce many cosmic jets. They were only able to find the black hole by its ability to see the position of the star (which it orbits) with great precision, explains Gaia team member Tinke Rogiers.
Black holes like this form from the collapse of massive stars, so Gaia BH1 and its companion star form a binary system. Of course, the formation and evolution of this system has not yet been determined. Rogiers described the black hole as “quite special,” saying, “This black hole is different from all other known ones, and its existence is difficult to explain with current standard evolution models.”
