(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of astronomers has presented a study describing a huge black hole, which the authors of the work call a monster. Surprisingly, it is located at a small distance from the Earth and is our closest neighbor of all known black holes.
The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal, and Phys.org briefly talks about it. The discovery of the “monster black hole” was quite unexpected, given its parameters. So, its mass is about 12 times the mass of the Sun.
“It is closer to the Sun than any other known black hole, only 1,550 light-years away,” says Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarty, a professor of physics at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and lead author of the study.
According to the researchers themselves, by cosmic standards, this is so close that the black hole is “practically in our backyard.”
To find this black hole, a team of scientists had to analyze data from about 200,000 binary systems. We used data obtained last summer by the Gaia spacecraft of the European Space Agency.
“We were looking for objects that were reported to have very large companions, but whose brightness could only be attributed to a single visible star,” says Chakrabarti. “So we had good reason to think the second companion was dark.”
In other words, in this case, a bright star was first discovered, which, judging by its characteristics, is affected by the gravitational tidal effect of an invisible neighbor. This neighbor turned out to be a supermassive black hole.
Scientists have not yet determined the mechanism of the influence of such objects on the galactic dynamics in our Milky Way.
But they suggest that if there are enough such black holes, then they may well influence the formation of our galaxy and its internal dynamics.
A feature of black holes is that their gravitational force is clearly “felt” by stars and other objects in their vicinity. However, to see them, as we see stars, is almost impossible, since light simply cannot escape from a black hole.
Therefore, researchers are looking for black holes by indirect signs, using, for example, spectrographic measurements from various telescopes.
“A black hole’s attraction to a visible star like the Sun can be determined from spectroscopic measurements that give us radial velocity data due to Doppler shift,” explains Chakrabarty. how the pitch of the siren changes when an ambulance passes by.”
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.