The closest black hole to Earth is not a black hole at all. While, astronomers say It’s just a two star system where one star sucks the life out of the other.
The closest black hole to Earth isn’t a black hole after all
In 2020, it was the mission he is leading. European Southern Observatory I mentioned the discovery of a black hole near Earth. In fact, it was just over 1,000 light-years away. This made it the closest black hole to our planet that we have ever discovered. Now, despite re-analyzing the data, astronomers say the system they discovered, HR6819It doesn’t actually have a black hole at all.
When it was first discovered, astronomers thought that HR6819 was a three-star system. They also believed that two stars orbited around a black hole. However, a Study led by Julia Bodensteiner, then a Ph.D. A student from KU Leuven in Belgium looked for an alternative option.
Bodensteiner said that HR6819 could be a two-star system without any black holes. This option means that one of the stars in the system had to be removed in the past. Essentially, one star would have lost much of its mass to the other star, causing the effect astronomers have noted. This alternative still leaves a mystery to be solved for astronomers.
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At about the same time as the Bodensteiner study, another study was conducted group of researchers He too was looking for discovery. They also found that the system was most likely a two-star system with one star extracting mass from the other. to the third study He also determined that the closest black hole to Earth was also not a black hole.
In that third study, astronomers Karim El-Badri and Elliot Quatert of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed the spectra of the system. They found that the mass of one star was greater than the mass of the other star. As such, they said, the single star is more bloated and appears to have recently been stripped and hired to become a hot secondary dwarf.
Bodensteiner’s team joined forces with another team led by KU Leaven researcher Abigail Frost to study the discovery in greater depth. Two years after its discovery, the team says that the closest black hole to Earth is actually just a two-star system where one star drew resources from another.
“Our best explanation so far is that we detected this binary system in an instant shortly after a star had absorbed its companion star’s atmosphere,” Bodensteiner said. wrote in a statement Featured on the ESO website. He also says that redundancy is very common in closed binary systems. As one of the stars pulled material from the other, the receiver began to spin faster.
It was this rapid rotation that helped create the illusion that the closest black hole to Earth had been born. to vampire star It’s still pretty scary, but at least we can rest easy knowing there aren’t any black holes within 1,500 light-years of us.