This black hole lies only 1,600 lightyears away, making it the closest known black hole to Earth

The closest black hole to Earth is a stellar-mass black hole named Gaia BH1, located just 1,600 light-years away.

Gaia BH1 was discovered in 2022 using a combination of telescopes, including the Gaia spacecraft, the 6.5m Magellan Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on Gemini North.

This black hole set a new record for being the nearest known black hole to Earth. Its existence was revealed when ESA’s Gaia space telescope detected the unusual motion of its stellar companion, a star similar to our Sun.

Gaia was instrumental in locating the closest known black hole to Earth. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier

Further analysis of the star’s movement indicated that it was orbiting an unseen black hole, which has a mass ten times that of the Sun.

“This is the first clear detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our Galaxy,” said Kareem El-Badry from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, who led the research.

The stellar pair, Gaia BH1, are separated by a distance comparable to that between Earth and the Sun, leaving astronomers puzzled about how the star survived the hypergiant phase that its companion must have undergone before collapsing into a black hole.

“It’s fascinating that this system doesn’t fit neatly into standard binary evolution models,” El-Badry noted. “It raises many questions about how this binary system came to be.” The largest known black hole, located in galaxy Abell 1201, is 33 billion times the mass of our Sun.

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Jan Steinman
Jan Steinman
23 days ago

Never mind. Found the answer to my question.

Last edited 23 days ago by Jan Steinman
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