European astronomers have found the closest black hole to Earth yet, so near that the two stars dancing with it can be seen by the naked eye.
The trouble is we can’t see them. Nothing, not even light, escapes a black hole’s gravity. Usually, scientists can only spot them when they’re gobbling up sections of a partner star or something else falling into them. Astronomers think most black holes, including this newly discovered one, don’t have anything close enough to swallow. So they go undetected.Astronomers found this one because of the unusual orbit of a star.
These are young hot stars compared to our 4.6 billion-year-old sun. They’re maybe 140 million years old, but at 26,000 degrees F they are three times hotter than the sun, Rivinius said. About 15 million years ago, one of those stars got too big and too hot and went supernova, turning into the black hole in a violent process, he said.
“It is most likely that there are black holes much closer than this one,” said Avi Loeb, director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, who wasn’t part of the study. “If you find an ant while scanning a tiny fraction of your kitchen, you know there must be many more out there.”
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