ASTRONOMERS have discovered a huge black hole just 1,924 light-years from our solar system.
Located in the constellation Aquila, the monstrous black hole is known as Gaia BH3 (or simply BH3).
It was named after the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which discovered the “sleeping giant”.
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
A black hole is an invisible area in space where gravity pulls so strongly that not even light can escape it.
Gravity in a black hole is so strong because its dense matter is contained in a tiny space – this happens when a star is dying.
This specific black hole is the most massive we’ve seen in the Milky Way, with a stellar mass.
HOW MASSIVE IS GAIA BH3?
Its mass weighs 33 times that of our Sun – the previous most massive black hole of this class found in the Milky Way has a mass of around 20 times that of the Sun.
Gaia BH3 is also the second closest black hole to Earth that we know of; the closest black hole is dubbed Gaia BH1.
Scientists discovered the black hole thanks to its companion star, which exhibited movements that could not be explained otherwise.
“No one expected to find a massive black hole lurking nearby, undetected until now,” he said. astronomer Pasquale Panuzzo.
Panuzzo works for the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, is a member of the Gaia collaboration and led the research into the new discoveries.
“This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life,” he added.
Panuzzo and his team confirmed the discovery by observing data from the Very Large Telescope at ESA’s Southern Observatory in Chile and other ground-based observatories.
The research was published Tuesday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Scientists say the new findings challenge what they know about how massive stars form and evolve.
“This black hole is not only very massive, it is also very peculiar in many ways,” said Panuzzo.
What is a black hole? The main facts
Here’s what you need to know…
- A black hole is a region of space where absolutely nothing can escape
- That’s because they have extremely strong gravitational effects, which means that once something enters a black hole, it can’t go back out.
- They get their name because not even light can escape once it’s sucked in – which is why a black hole is completely dark.
What is an event horizon?
- There must be a point where you are so close to a black hole that you cannot escape
- Otherwise, literally everything in the universe would have been sucked into a
- The point at which you can no longer escape the gravitational pull of a black hole is called the event horizon.
- The event horizon varies between different black holes depending on their mass and size
What is a singularity?
- The gravitational singularity is the center of a black hole
- It is a one-dimensional point that contains an incredibly large mass in an infinitely small space
- At the singularity, spacetime curves infinitely and the gravitational pull is infinitely strong
- The conventional laws of physics stop applying at this point
How are black holes created?
- Most black holes are formed when a supergiant star dies
- This happens when stars run out of fuel – like hydrogen – to burn, causing the star to collapse.
- When this happens, gravity quickly pulls the center of the star inward and it turns into a small ball.
- It expands and contracts until a final collapse, causing part of the star to collapse inward thanks to gravity, and the rest of the star to explode outward.
- The remaining central ball is extremely dense, and if it’s especially dense, you get a black hole
One of the reasons the black hole is intriguing researchers is that it (along with its companion) travels in the opposite direction to the way stars normally orbit in the Milky Way.
That
WHAT WE KNOW
Astronomers typically divide black holes into three categories based on mass: stellar mass, supermassive, and intermediate mass.
Stellar-mass black holes comprise a star more than eight times the mass of the Sun that runs out of fuel.
When this happens, its core collapses and forms what is known as a supernova.
A supermassive black hole is found at the center of almost every galaxy, including our Milky Way,
These monstrous objects are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the Sun, NASA noted.
Although “some scientists put the lower limit at tens of thousands,” the agency added.
Meanwhile, intermediate black holes confuse scientists in terms of their size.
Theoretically, they have significantly more mass than stellar black holes, but fewer supermassive black holes.
“They think there should be a size continuum because, over cosmic time, collisions between stellar-mass black holes should have created some intermediate-mass black holes,” NASA said.
This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
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