![]() ![]() These kinds of stars are short lived, their fuel burns bright, hot, and fast, and they die young, usually after only a few million years. It’s likely the black hole, dubbed Gaia BH1, was formed by the death of a star 20 times the mass of the Sun or more. That’s still plenty far away for us not to worry about it, at least in the foreseeable future. This discovery is the first confirmed observation of a dormant stellar mass black hole which would make it notable all on its own, but its position less than 1,600 lightyears away also places it about three times closer to Earth than the previous proximity record holder. “Take the Solar System, put a black hole where the Sun is, and the Sun where the Earth is, and you get this system,” said Kareem El-Badry, the paper’s lead author, in a statement. In fact, the distance between the star and the black hole is about the same as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The combination of data confirmed the presence of an unseen object about 10 times the mass of the Sun near the target star. They then studied the star more closely using ground based telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. ![]() While looking at the Gaia data, researchers noticed small irregularities in the movements of a star 1,560 lightyears away in the constellation Ophiuchus, which suggested the presence of something massive but invisible nearby. During its mission, it has mapped the positions, speeds, and trajectories of roughly 2 billion stars in our own galaxy. Researchers started their search by scouring the data collected by Gaia. Their findings were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Ī plasma-spewing black hole is killing a neighboring galaxy's ability to make stars Recently, scientists pinpointed the location of one of these dormant stellar mass black holes and it’s closer than any black hole we’ve ever found before.Īn international team of astronomers used combined data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft and ground based telescope observations to closely measure the gravity around a star roughly 1,600 lightyears away and found a black hole hiding nearby. Black holes not in the process of filling their endless maws are effectively invisible, except for the ways their gravitational influence distorts the space around them. The light from these destructive close proximity relationships lights up the sky with X-ray light, making them easier for our telescopes to see. Most of the stellar mass black holes we have detected so far are in the process of consuming nearby companion stars. Scientists estimate there are 100 million stellar mass black holes, with masses between five and 100 times that of our Sun, populating the Milky Way alone, but they are incredibly difficult to find. There is, however, another kind of black hole which is more difficult to find. In recent years we have succeeded at imaging some of those black holes, confirming they are right where we expected them to be. It’s believed there are supermassive black holes at the heart of every galaxy, an incredible point of intense gravity around which the galaxy spins. Hawking’s work, along with colleagues all over the world, has revealed a cosmos filled with endlessly hungry gravity wells whose numbers nearly rival the stars themselves. It also led to The Theory of Everything, a dramatic adaptation of Hawking’s life, released in 2014. There, he began thinking about black holes, a path of inquiry which would eventually lead to a career as perhaps the greatest mind in a generation. Before Stephen Hawking was synonymous with genius, he was an astrophysics student at the University of Cambridge. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |