New one In the study Experts present a record-breaking black hole, writes A Space.com. The object with a mass of about 10 solar masses is located about 1,560 light-years from Earth, which is a very small distance from a cosmological point of view.
Gaia BH1 is located in a binary system with a star similar to the Sun. The two bodies are as far from each other as the earth and the sun.
Karim Al-Badri, a fellow of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and a member of the team, many similar potential systems had previously been discovered, but all observations were later disproved. “This is the first clear detection of a sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy,” he said.
According to estimates, there may be approximately 100 million stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way, each of which is 5-100 times heavier than the Sun. Due to their small size, detecting this type of object is not easy, it is even more difficult to find black holes that are in a binary system, but they are inactive, so they do not absorb material from a neighboring star.
The researchers used an alternative method to search for similar organisms. The team analyzed data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, a telescope that measures the location, speed and orbit of nearly two billion stars in our galaxy.
One of the celestial bodies in question is the Gaya Companion BH1. The star’s motion shows small anomalies, indicating that it is affected by the gravitational pull of a massive object. Experts confirmed the existence of the black hole using ground-based telescopes. Based on the results, the object has a mass of 10 solar masses and orbits around the system’s center of mass in about 186 Earth days.
Gaia BH1 may have been born from the destruction of a star of at least 20 solar masses. These giants only live for a few million years and then greatly enlarge before they die. Based on modeling, the companion star must have perished in the process, as a farther orbit would be needed to survive.
