A Team of astronomers identified that most massive stellar black hole so far in the Milky Way with a mass 33 times greater than that of the Sun, this Tuesday reported European Southern Observatory (ESO). The black hole was discovered in data from the Gaia mission, a space observatory operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) that explores the sky from Earth orbit to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the Via Dairy.
Data from ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope and other ground-based observatories were used to verify the mass of the black hole, which turns out to be correct 33 times the mass of the Sun. The discovery was possible because the black hole imposes a strange “wobble” on the companion star orbiting it. Stellar black holes form due to the collapse of massive stars and those identified so far in the Milky Way are on average about ten times more massive than the Sun.
Even the most massive known stellar black hole in our galaxy, Cygnus X-1, only reaches 21 solar masses, making this new observation extraordinary. ESO also pointed out that, surprisingly, this black hole is also very close to Earth, just 2,000 light-years away, in the constellation Aquila second closest known black hole.
It was named Gaia BH3, or BH3 for short, and was found when the team was reviewing Gaia observations while preparing a new data release. “Nobody expected to find a giant black hole “It is lurking nearby and has not been discovered yet,” he said. Pasquale PanuzzoMember of the Gaia collaboration and astronomer at the Paris Observatory, part of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
“This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research career,” he emphasized. The astronomical community has previously discovered similarly massive black holes outside our galaxy and theorized that they could be formed by the collapse of stars whose chemical composition contains very few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It is assumed that these are metal-poor stars They lose less mass over their lifetime and therefore, after their death, they are left with more material to create massive black holes. However, so far there has been no evidence that metal-poor stars are directly linked to massive black holes.
The star couples They tend to have similar compositions, meaning BH3’s companion contains important clues about the star that collapsed to form this extraordinary black hole, ESO explains. This companion was a very metal-poor star, suggesting that the star that collapsed to form BH3 was also metal-poor, as predicted.