- Astronomers have identified a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy with a mass 33 times that of the Sun.
- The newly discovered black hole is the second largest known black hole in our galaxy, after the supermassive black hole at its center.
- The black hole, named Gaia BH3, is located 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila and has a companion star orbiting around it.
Astronomers have discovered a black hole with about 33 times the mass of the Sun. This is the largest known object in the Milky Way, other than the supermassive black hole that lurks at the center of our galaxy.
The newly identified black hole is located about 2,000 light-years from Earth, relatively close to Earth in the constellation Aquila, and has a companion star orbiting around it, researchers announced Tuesday. One light year is the distance that light travels in one year, which is 5.9 trillion miles.
Black holes are extremely dense celestial bodies with a gravitational force so strong that not even light can escape, making them difficult to detect. The star was identified through observations made by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which is conducting a large-scale stellar population survey, because it caused a wobbling motion in its companion star. To verify the mass of the black hole, data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, based in Chile, and other ground-based observatories were used.
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“This black hole is not only very huge, but also very unusual in many ways. This is really something we didn’t expect to see,” says the French researcher, who works at the Paris Observatory. said Pasquale Panuzzo, a research engineer at the agency CNRS. Lead author of the study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
This handout image, obtained by Reuters on April 16, 2024, shows an artist’s impression of the galaxy’s most massive black hole, called Gaia BH3, and the orbit of its companion star. Astronomers have discovered a black hole with a mass of about 33. Many times larger than our Sun, it is the largest known black hole in the Milky Way, apart from the supermassive black hole that lurks at the center of our galaxy. (European Southern Observatory/L. Calcada/Handout via Reuters)
For example, a black hole called Gaia BH3 and its companions are moving through the galaxy in the opposite direction from which stars normally orbit in the Milky Way.
Gaia BH3 likely formed after the death of a star more than 40 times more massive than the Sun, the researchers said.
A black hole created by the collapse of a single star is called a stellar black hole. Gaia BH3 is the largest known stellar black hole, said study co-author Tsevi Mazeh, an astronomer at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
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Stellar black holes are smaller in size than the supermassive black holes that live at the centers of most galaxies. One of the black holes, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, is located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It has 4 million times the mass of the Sun and is approximately 26,000 light-years from Earth.
Gaia BH3’s progenitor star was composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. Stars in the early universe had such a chemical composition known as low metallicity. This star formed relatively early in the history of the universe, perhaps 2 billion years after the Big Bang event.
When that star exploded at the end of its life (called a supernova), some of its material was blown into space, and the rest violently collapsed to form a black hole.
Panuzzo said the discovery of Gaia BH3 supports models of stellar evolution that show that massive stellar black holes can only be produced by stars with low metallicity, such as this star’s ancestor star.
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Gaia BH3’s companion star is as old as the others, has about 76% the mass of the Sun, is slightly cooler, but about 10 times brighter. Black holes orbit in elliptical orbits ranging from about 4.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, a measure called astronomical units (AU) to 29 astronomical units. For comparison, Jupiter orbits at a distance of about 5 AU from the Sun, and Neptune orbits at a distance of about 30 AU.
Elisabetta Cuffo, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory and co-author of the study, said: “To me, the surprising result is that the chemical composition of this companion star shows nothing special, and that it is the result of a black hole supernova explosion.” It was the fact that he had not received any.” .
Scientists don’t know how big a star’s black hole can get.
“There is active scientific debate about the maximum mass of a stellar black hole,” Panuzzo said.
