Newly Discovered Black Hole in Solar System Found Near Earth’s Backyard [Study]

A supposedly "monster" black hole 12 times as massive as the sun has been found near Earth, according to a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

"It is closer to the sun than any other known black hole, at a distance of 1,550 light years," Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti, the Pei-Ling Chan Endowed Chair in the Department of Physics at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System, said in a statement. "So, it's practically in our backyard."

Chakrabarti and a national team of scientists combed through roughly 200,000 binary stars' worth of data that the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite project published over the summer to complete the enormous task of finding the black hole.

According to Chakrabarti, they looked for objects whose brilliance might be attributed to a single visible star but which were supposed to have massive companion masses. In light of this, it is reasonable to assume that the companion is dark.

The Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, the Automated Planet Finder in California, and the W.M. The final competing sources' readings came from Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Researchers submitted their study to The Astrophysical Journal.

What If It Hits Earth?

Science Alert said that black holes are of great interest to astronomers because they provide possibilities to investigate physics principles in the most extreme settings. Supermassive black holes (SMBH), which are found in the center of the majority of massive galaxies, are one example where they play an important role in galaxy formation and evolution.

New Atlas said astronomers working on the new research looked at data from over 200,000 binary star systems that the sky-scanning Gaia satellite had discovered. The team was hunting for evidence of stars circling huge, invisible objects among them.

Following up on the most promising prospects, measurements of the star's light spectrum were made using various tools, including the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. If a black hole exists, it can be found because its powerful gravitational pull alters the star's light during its orbit.

Black Hole or Neutron Star? Unknown ‘Free-Floating’ Compact Object in Milky Way Discovered Through Gravitational Microlensing — The first picture of a black hole was made using observations of the center of galaxy M87 taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole 6.5 billion times the Sun’s mass. Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration / NASA

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One system, in particular, drew their attention using this technique: a visible star circling something more than 12 times more massive than the Sun. One orbit is finished every 185 days.

The fact that this black hole is only 1,550 light-years distant is striking. Even while it might not seem like it, that distance is quite close in cosmic terms.

In fact, it's among the nearest objects ever found and could perhaps be the closest object ever found.

The title now belongs to an object in the system V Puppis, which is 960 light-years distant, however, this object's status as a black hole has not yet been established. Other recent contenders for the title include HR 6819, which is 1,000 light-years away, and the "Unicorn," which is 1,120 light-years away. However, all of these have subsequently been reclassified as other compact objects.

What If It Hits Earth?

What if a black hole was considerably closer-possibly even swam through our solar system?

The gravity of black holes is so intense that not even light can escape their grasp. They are created from the dense cores of dying stars, which have collapsed under the force of the star's gravitational pull.

Florian Peissker, an astrophysicist at the University of Cologne in Germany, told Newsweek that one needs to understand that the pressure of a non-collapsed star causes merging events due to its mass.

According to the same Newsweek article, astronomer and executive director of Curtin University's Institute of Radio Astronomy Steven Tingay, Earth would need to have a very near encounter with a massive black hole before the planet is destroyed.

He asserted that the interaction's effects would be disastrous long before the Earth is obliterated. The Earth or another planet may very likely be thrown out of the solar system by significant disruption of their orbits, which would be just as bad-if, not worse, than being sucked into a black hole.