Black holes come in a variety of sizes, from stellar black holes a few times the mass of the sun all the way up to supermassive black holes, which are millions of times the mass of the sun and lurk at the heart of galaxies. It is one of the closest black holes ever discovered, with a mass 12 times that of the sun. Being so close to us, it’s an exciting target for future research.
The black hole was discovered using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which is building a 3D map of the entire galaxy. The researchers looked at nearly 200,000 binary stars, in which a star orbits a companion, to search for cases where the brightness of one star was sufficient to explain the brightness of the binary. That implies that the companion in these binaries must be dark, which suggests the companion could be a black hole.
“In this case we’re looking at a monster black hole but it’s on a long-period orbit of 185 days, or about half a year,” Chakrabarti said. “It’s pretty far from the visible star and not making any advances toward it.”
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