‘Nearest Black Hole 1000 light years from us’

I know, you must be thinking, a person obsessed with KPOP also knows about BLACK HOLES ?’.The thing is that I love a variety of stuff and a small part of it is captured by my thoughts on space. So here it goes……….

But before I even start, I know that most of you don’t know or you might have “Forgotten” what is a black hole and how it is formed. So here is a little back story about the same-

Black Holes are the result of dying stars known as supernovas. We can frame it this way that Black holes are areas in the space where gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape it. That is the reason they appear black.

Inactive Black holes are invisible and cannot be seen. But if their is a star close by, but not too close, they can see the star wobble.

Now coming back to the point, I was surfing through a social media website and I found this title ‘The nearest black hole discovered’ pop in BIG BOLD LETTERS. So OBVIOUSLY I had to do some research and find out what was going on and this is what I found:

As far as we know, the nearest black hole till now discovered was V616 Mon which is 3000 light years away. But scientists have recently discovered a Black hole which is just 1000 light years away or we can say that it is roughly 10 thousand, million, million km away. It may have occurred to you that, “WHOA !! It is soooooo far !” but if we see it in universal scale, you will be amazed to know that it is somewhat like our neighbour. It is THE CLOSEST black hole discovered.

BUT DO NOT WORRY. As for now, it is not a threat to our Earth

This video by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) explains the discovered black hole as well as the triple system of which the two companions are visible to the naked eye.

Scientists were originally observing HR 6819 in order to study double – star system.

But while doing this, they found a third body, which has been previously undiscovered. This body is a BLACK HOLE

The mass of this Black hole is 4 times that of a sun.

“Black holes aren’t rare; they’re just very hard to find,”

– Thomas Rivinius, astronomer at ESO

The cool part is that this was an accidental discovery.

On November 2019, Rivinus an astronomer and also a long time friend and colleague of Stan Stefl thought to research again about HR 6819 after it had been dropped aside back in 2014 after the leader of this project Stefl died in a car accident.

What made him researching about HR 6819 again was that a separate group published a study that detailed a star system nicknamed LB-1 with a black hole about 70 times more massive than our sun.

This work was questioned as when a star big enough to yield black holes of that size dies, it explodes in such a way that the resulting debris can’t collapse back in on itself and thus black holes of that mass shouldn’t be formed.

But this work also made Rivinus’s team notice that the data of LB-1 strongly resembled that of HR 6819.

They set out to research about the same and found that the invisible object orbiting along with the stars had 4 times the mass of the sun.

ISN’T all of this SOOOOO interesting ?

Hope you had fun reading all of this and probably got to know more about the black hole.

Wait for more amazing stuff coming up

Till then

TA TA !