The smallest ever … Scientists have discovered the closest black hole to Earth

The smallest ever ... Scientists have discovered the closest black hole to Earth

Since the discovery of the first black hole in our Milky Way galaxy, numerous researchers have been interested in exploring and studying these strange objects in the features of our galaxy.

A research team from the US “Ohio State University” was able to observe and create a black hole 1500 light years away from Earth. Official report The university released it on April 21, naming the closest black hole ever discovered to Earth, the “unicorn”.

Black holes are the final stages in the life of giant stars because the object of the star collapses on its own by a large explosion, which has the enormous ability to attract a dark ball to the center, with its hands so large that it cannot escape light.

Black holes are the final stage in the age of giant stars (NASA)

Red giants

We have to come to those conclusions Accepted to post In the “Monthly Announcements of the Royal Astronomical Society” magazine, the team studied a red giant orbiting the “unicorn” black hole with 3 telescopes, the “Celt” laboratory in Arizona and the “Asas” laboratory in Chile, and the NASA “Des” satellite.

Red giants are a large class of stars with low temperatures. If the sun were the size of a pea, one of these stars would be the size of a basketball.

Scientists cannot directly observe black holes because they emit no light, but rather absorb it, so they monitor the impact of black holes on objects next to them. Due to the powerful gravity of the black hole, it affects the shape of the red giant that surrounds it, and by extension affects the nature and intensity of the light coming from it.

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When ground-based telescopes take light from this red giant, they can confirm that it is orbiting a black hole, which happened in the case of the “unicorn”, according to the study.

Astronomers estimate that there are 10 million to one billion black holes (NASA) in the Milky Way

3 suns

Most notable of these results is the mass of this new black hole, which is only equal to 3 solar masses, which means that it is the smallest black hole ever discovered, falling into a completely new type of black hole.

Since the discovery of the first black hole in our Milky Way galaxy known as “Chicken X-1”, numerous researchers have been interested in finding and studying these strange objects on the sides of our galaxy, and now we know that there are tens of thousands of them, and that there are 10 million to a billion black holes in the Milky Way. Astronomers consider.

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