Astronomers Find Earth’s Closest Black Hole In The Milky Way

Photo Credit: NOIR Lab

Astronomers have discovered our newest celestial neighbor in the form of a massive black hole. The newly discovered black hole is ten times bigger than our Sun, and is located around 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, The New York Times reports. It is by far the closest black hole discovered to our planet.

Previously, the nearest black hole to Earth was found 3,000 light years away, as detailed in a paper published recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

ESA GAIA Data Helped Discover The Black Hole

A team of scientists led by Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, suggests that the black hole is inactive, lying in the GAIA BH1 star system. The team believes the discovery of the black hole hints at several other star systems with dormant black holes.

"This is the nearest known black hole by a factor of three," reads the paper, "and its discovery suggests the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in binaries."

According to the paper, the team found the black hole by studying the data of the European Space Agency's GAIA spacecraft that keeps track of Milky Way stars. The data helped the team determine that one of GAIA BH1’s stars was jiggling, hinting towards a presence of a powerful force, similar to a black hole.

A Hidden Black Hole

The team also leveraged the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to examine the speed and rhythm of the star’s jiggle. According to the NYT report, astronomers use this technique to analyze the size of exoplanets orbiting stars, which causes a similar wobble.

Eventually, the team’s calculations support the notion that this binary star system is hosting a hidden black hole, which orbits a star similar to the size of our sun.

"It poses many questions about how this binary system was formed," said El-Badry, "as well as how many of these dormant black holes there are out there."

Scientists Discover “Extragalactic Structure”

A team of astronomers has managed to discover an “extragalactic structure” in the “zone of avoidance” (ZOA), a region of space tough to explore due to the Milky Way galaxy’s bulge.

The researchers claim the “extragalactic structure” is a sizeable galaxy cluster. The team used the European Southern Observatory’s VVV survey to examine the infrared light that travels past Milky Way’s obstructive bulge because visible light cannot pass through it.