Thursday, October 13, 2022

A relatively close black hole

This was in Science last month:

Unless they’re belching up stars or rippling spacetime in a partnered dance, light-trapping black holes are notoriously difficult to spot. But a new proposed discovery of a dormant black hole may help unveil a population lurking in the darkness, New Scientist reports. Because the object emits no light, astronomers detected it by studying the warped orbit and spectrum of a nearby Sun-like star using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope and multiple ground-based observatories. The black hole candidate (artist’s impression of a different black hole, above), dubbed Gaia BH1, is 10 times the mass of the Sun and a mere 1500 light-years away—three times closer to Earth than the next known neighbor, researchers report on the arXiv preprint server last week. The long orbital period and proximity make this black hole a prime target to study the physics of these invisible enigmas, which could help scientists identify many more examples in the two remaining data releases from Gaia.
Update:  Oh, just a minute.  In 2020 I posted about a black hole that might only be 1000 light years away.

1 comment:

GMB said...

They bullshit about black holes. So you caught them out.