"Smoking gun" reveals closest massive black hole to Earth (2024)
A rare "massive" black hole has been discovered about 18,000 light years from our planet—the closest of its type to our solar system ever found—after fast-moving stars provided "smoking gun" evidence of its existence.
The intermediate-sized black hole—thought to have a mass of 20,000 times that of our own sun—was discovered lurking in the center of a cluster of 10 million stars named Omega Centauri, according to a new paper in the journal Nature.
This marks a rare uncovering of an intermediate-sized black hole, which may be a result of a smaller galaxy being swallowed by our Milky Way.
The discovery was made after astronomers used 20 years' worth of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to study over a million stars in the Omega Centauri cluster, and compared them to theoretical models of how the stars would move if a black hole were indeed present. A black hole was long suspected to be present in the center of the cluster, but has only now been confirmed to exist.
"Led by the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Germany, our team searched for fast-moving stars expected to exist near concentrated masses, like black holes," study co-author Holger Baumgardt, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Queensland, Australia, said in a statement.
"Identifying these stars was the smoking gun evidence we needed to prove the black hole's existence, and we did," he said. "When I saw the data, I immediately knew we found something special. Astronomers have tried to find one of these black holes for over 20 years, and now we have finally succeeded."
The astronomers found that the observed movements of seven fast-moving stars could only be explained by the presence of a black hole around 20,000 times the mass of our own sun. This would make the black hole a sort of "missing link" between the smaller stellar black holes and much larger supermassive black holes.
Stellar black holes are formed from the remnants of massive stars that have undergone supernova explosions, and usually have masses ranging from about five to 150 times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are much larger, with masses ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the sun. They are found at the centers of most galaxies, including our Milky Way.
This black hole, with a mass of 20,000 solar masses, is therefore somewhere in between. It also marks the closest "massive" black hole—larger than stellar black holes—found to our planet at 18,000 light years away, beating our galaxy's central supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, which is about 27,000 light years away.
"This class of black holes has been a theory for decades but is now fully confirmed to exist," Baumgardt said.
This may be because Omega Centauri was originally the core of a young galaxy, with the black hole being a teenage galactic core that would have eventually grown to a supermassive black hole. However, the black hole's growth may have been stunted after the Milky Way swallowed up the smaller galaxy, leaving it "frozen in time."
"Previous studies had prompted critical questions of, 'So, where are the high-speed stars?' We now have an answer to that and the confirmation that Omega Centauri contains an intermediate-mass black hole. At a distance of about 18,000 light-years, this is the closest known example of a massive black hole," co-author Nadine Neumayer, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in another statement.
The astronomers hope to further investigate this rare black hole, and find out more about its evolution and the stars orbiting it.
"I think this will invigorate the field and lead to a lot of new research in this area," Baumgardt said. "We can begin to speculate how this black hole formed, how it's related to other massive black holes astronomers have found and where other intermediate-mass black holes might exist.
"It's a thrilling time to be an astronomer and we're excited to see where our discovery will lead."
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Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
That title goes to TON 618, which is an astonishing 66 billion solar masses. It's so big that astronomers had to invent a new term to describe it; hence, TON 618 is what's become known as an ultramassive black hole.
The best evidence of stellar-mass black holes comes from binary star systems in which (1) one star of the pair is not visible, (2) the flickering X-ray emission is characteristic of an accretion disk around a compact object, and (3) the orbit and characteristics of the visible star indicate that the mass of its ...
Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape.And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
Astronomers have found the largest stellar black hole ever spotted, dubbed Gaia-BH3. It has a mass 33 times that of the sun, dwarfed only by supermassive black holes and those that formed through mergers of other black holes.
Stellar black holes are dwarfed in size by the supermassive black holes inhabiting the center of most galaxies. One such black hole called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is located at the heart of the Milky Way. It possesses 4 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth.
Supermassive. Almost every large galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center. These monster objects have hundreds of thousands to billions of times the Sun's mass, although some scientists place the lower boundary at tens of thousands.
Rather than a devil or a trickster then, black holes could be the nurturing childhood pals of their galaxies – growing up alongside them and maybe even helping them to form stars. Sagittarius A*. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.
There is no danger of the Earth (located 26,000 light years away from the Milky Way's black hole) being pulled in. Future galaxy collisions will cause black holes to grow in size, for example by merging of two black holes.
Even if we see the universe from a point very close to the apparent event horizon, the time dilates to such an extent that the time of the locations away from tne universe will be much faster (say 1 second for the observer near blak hole will be 100000 years for an observer on earth).
In terms of power, quasars are more powerful than black holes. Quasars are extremely luminous objects that emit enormous amounts of energy, making them the most powerful sources of radiation in the universe.
The nearest white dwarf is a companion of the nearby star Sirius. Moreover, scientists aren't sure how powerful the explosion may be and how far its consequences may be felt. The possibility of a white dwarf destroying us makes this type of star even more dangerous than a black hole.
Within any black hole is the central point, the singularity, which has infinite gravity and where mass is compressed into an infinitely small point. There, it is game over. There's no surviving. And therefore the idea of traveling through time and space, via black hole or wormhole, don't really register in reality.
Gaia-BH3 is located just 2,000 light years from Earth, making it the second-closest black hole to our planet ever discovered. The closest black hole to Earth is Gaia-BH1 (also discovered by Gaia), which is 1,560 light-years away.
Gaia BH1, at ~10 solar masses, with an orbital period of ~180 days, and located just 1560 light-years away, now holds the record (as of 2022) for closest black hole known to our Solar System.
Data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia mission revealed the closest known - and second closest - black holes in 2022, Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2, which are 1,560 light-years and 3,800 light-years from Earth respectively.
Phoenix-A is the biggest supermassive black hole known to exist - with a mass of 100 billion solar masses, whereas, Ton-618 is of 66 billion solar masses and S5 0014+81 is estimated to be of 40 billion solar masses.
Introduction: My name is Arielle Torp, I am a comfortable, kind, zealous, lovely, jolly, colorful, adventurous person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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