UNITED STATES: Black holes, the mysterious cosmic giants, and even light cannot escape the gravitational pull from them. Recent research suggests that Black holes are closer than we previously believed.
Now that the stellar-mass black hole has been discovered, which is the closest one to Earth known to astronomers, it has become a focus for research on developing these extreme phenomena.
Astronomers utilizing the Gemini Observatory, administered by the NOIRLab of the NSF, have discovered the closest black hole to Earth. Researchers are now focused on the mysterious cosmic giant that belongs to the stellar-mass category to comprehend the evolution of these extreme objects.
It’s interesting to note that this is the Milky Way’s first clear finding of a dormant stellar-mass black hole. It have masses between five and one hundred times those of the Sun, are far more prevalent. It is thought that the Milky Way alone contains 100 million of these. The results have been published in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices.
The black hole that has been discovered to be the nearest to Earth is around 10 times as large as the Sun and is situated about 1600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus, which is three times closer than the previous record-holder, an X-ray binary in the constellation of Monoceros.
Astronomers using the Gemini North telescope on the Hawaiian island, one of the International Gemini Observatory’s twin telescopes, discovered a Sun-like star orbiting the mysterious cosmic giant at about the same distance as the Earth orbits the Sun.
The team initially discovered that the system might contain a black hole by studying data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. They eventually discovered that the core object is a black hole that is nearly ten times as massive as the Sun using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph instrument on Gemini North.
The team precisely calculated the companion star’s orbital period by measuring its velocity as it circled the mysterious cosmic giant.
Astronomers believed that the progenitor star, which later transformed into the freshly discovered black hole, only had a brief career of a few million years.
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