Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. Bryan Lynn adapted the reports for VOA Learning English. The Associated Press and Reuters reported on this story. “If you find an ant while scanning a tiny fraction of your kitchen, you know there must be many more out there.” “It is most likely that there are black holes much closer than this one,” he told the AP. But in a few million years the closer star is expected to grow as part of its life cycle.Īvi Loeb is director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative. Rivinius said the two stars are far enough away from the black hole that it is not pulling material from them. About 15 million years ago, one of the stars got too big and too hot and went supernova, turning into the black hole in a violent process, he added. They may be 140 million years old, but at 15,000 degrees Celsius, they are three times hotter than the sun. Rivinius said these are young, hot stars compared to our 4.6 billion-year-old sun. “It will motivate additional searches among bright, relatively nearby stars,” said Ohio State University astronomer Todd Thompson. Other astronomers say the theory makes sense. They decided it could only be a black hole. They say their telescope observations confirmed that there was an object about four times the mass of our sun pulling on the inner star. Astronomers think most black holes remain unseen because they do not have anything close enough to swallow up.Īstronomers found the new one because of the triple system formation. Scientists can only find them when they are eating away at parts of a partner star or something else falls into them.
It sits in the constellation Telescopium in the sky’s Southern Hemisphere.Īstronomers theorize there are between 100 million to 1 billion of these small but dense objects in the Milky Way. The newly discovered black hole is gravitationally attached to two stars in a so-called triple system, the researchers said. That black hole is four million times the sun’s mass. Petr Hadrava of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech. Some are huge, like the one at our galaxy’s center 26,000 light years from Earth. Prior to this discovery, the closest-known black hole was A0620-00 in the constellation of Monoceros at a distance of 3,000 light years. Rivinius said the next closest black hole to Earth is probably about three times further, about 3,200 light years away.īlack holes are extremely dense objects with gravitational pulls so powerful that not even light can escape. But he noted that in terms of the universe and the galaxy, we should consider the new find “just around the corner.” In an interview with Reuters news agency, he admitted the black hole is still very far from Earth. Thomas Rivinius led the research for the European Southern Observatory. The research recently appeared in the publication Astronomy & Astrophysics. They found the black hole using a telescope based in Chile. The discovery was made by researchers from the European Southern Observatory. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 9.5 trillion kilometers. It sits about 1,000 light years from Earth. The black hole is believed to be at least 4.2 times the mass of the sun. European astronomers say they have found the closest black hole to Earth ever discovered.
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