Astronomers discover closest black hole to Earth 10 times as large as the sun

Astronomers announced on Friday the discovery of the closest known black hole that is 10 times as massive as the sun. 

Scientists found the black hole, named Gaia BH1, 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, making it the black hole that is closest to Earth as far as we know. The next nearest known black hole is 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. 

Apart from being the closest black hole to our planet, Astronomers believe this is an important discovery because Gaia BH1 isn’t doing anything: it is not gravitationally consuming everything into its nothingness or sucking in nearby stars. Instead, the new black hole is dormant. 

Gaia BH1 was found by Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics. El-Badry found the black hole by going through data from the European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, which tracks the exact positions and motions of millions of stars in the milky way. 

After detecting a star similar to our sun that was jittering strangely, El-Badry and his team investigated further. They received help from researchers in charge of the Gemini North telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, who measured the speed and period of the wobble. 

The results were astounding: these calculations were consistent with a black hole ten times the size of our sun.  

“This is the nearest known black hole by a factor of three, and its discovery suggests the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in binaries,” he and his co-authors wrote in a paper published on Wednesday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

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

Black holes are one of the most obscure and violent phenomena found in nature, nothing can escape their grasp and they are so dense that not even light can escape from within them.