It is located 2,000 light-years from Earth, cosmologically, in the constellation Aquila.
Astronomers have discovered the second largest known black hole in the Milky Way. Reuters.
Los Astronomers have discovered a black hole with a mass 33 times that of our Sun. The largest known in milky way Besides A supermassive black hole It lurks at our core Galaxy.
A newly identified black hole It is about 2,000 light-years away from Earth. Relatively close in cosmic terms Aquila constellationand a companion star orbiting it, researchers said Tuesday. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
Space, Milky Way. Photo: Unsplash.
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Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with very strong gravitational pull Even light can't get out and it's hard to detect. Thanks this was identified Observations made by the European Space Agency's Gaia missionThis creates a large stellar population because it causes an oscillating motion in its companion star.
“It's really something we didn't expect to see.”
To verify the mass of the black hole, data from A very large telescope European Southern Observatory based in Chile and other terrestrial laboratories.
“This black hole It is not only very large, but very strange in many respects. Indeed Something We Didn't Expect”says Pasquale Panuzzo, a research engineer at the French research institute CNRS who works at the Paris Observatory and is lead author of the study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
For example, called a black hole Gaia BH3 And his partner travels inside Galaxy In the opposite direction to how stars normally orbit milky way.
Universe, space, solar system. Photo: Unsplash.
According to researchers, Gaia BH3 It was formed after the death of a star with a mass 40 times that of the Sun.
Black holes that result from the collapse of a star are called stellar black holes. Gaia BH3 According to the astronomer and co-author of the study, it is the largest known stellar black hole. Tsevi Mazehfrom Tel Aviv University (Israel).
Stellar black holes are dwarfed by supermassive black holes that reside at the centers of most galaxies. One of these black holes, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is located at the center of the Milky Way.
has About 4 million times the mass of our Sun and about 26,000 light-years away from Earth.
Gaia's progenitor star BH3 is almost completely composed Hydrogen and Helium. Stars in the early universe had this chemical composition known as low metallicity. This star is FIt formed relatively early in the history of the universe, about 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
when The star exploded at the end of its lifeWhat is known SupernovaSome objects were ejected into space, while the rest collapsed violently Creates a black hole.
According to Panuzzo, the discovery of Gaia BH3, Supports stellar evolution models It shows that massive stellar black holes can only be formed by a low-metallicity star like its parent star.
Gaia's companion star, BH3, is as old as the others, It is approximately 76% the mass of the Sun and slightly cooler, but about 10 times brighter. It orbits the black hole following an elliptical path at a distance of about 4.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, which is called one astronomical unit (AU) and is 29 AU. compare, Jupiter orbits five AU from the Sun and Neptune 30 AU.
“The surprising result for me was that the chemical composition of this companion star did not show anything special, so it was not affected by the explosion. “Black Hole Supernova”Elisabetta Caffau, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory and co-author of the study, announced.
Scientists don't know how big interstellar black holes can be. “The maximum mass of a galactic black hole is the subject of an active scientific debate,” Panuzzo says.
