The exciting finding promises numerous similar discoveries. Using data from ESA’s Gaia astrometry mission, astronomers have identified the closest known black hole, less than 1600 light-years away from Earth, and determined its mass. The black hole is orbiting a star similar to our Sun, and was ide
. The discovery also shows up gaps in current astronomical knowledge, namely about the formation of binary star systems.
There have been several attempts to also find “quiescent” black holes in binary systems – black holes without an X-ray-emitting disk. The tool of choice: stellar spectra, the rainbow-like decomposition of star light, which contain information about a star’s motion. We know this, from everyday life, from the “Doppler effect” for sound: an ambulance with a blaring siren will sound higher-pitched when it is coming towards us, and lower-pitched once it has passed us.
When Gaia’s data release 3 , the first to contain the orbital data for binary systems detected with Gaia, was published in mid-June 2022, Kareem El-Badry, together with MPIA director Hans-Walter Rix and their colleagues directly set about sifting the data for likely candidates. Generally, as two objects in a binary system orbit each other, they each trace out a tiny ellipse in the sky. Gaia DR3 contains data for 168,065 such tiny ellipses, or parts thereof.
Another candidate could be ruled out by the bad fit of the Gaia data to the reconstructed orbit, with an orbital period so long that Gaia should not have been able to measure it in the first place. A fifth candidate is still under consideration, awaiting additional spectral measurements.The remaining candidate, Gaia DR3 4373465352415301632, which the researchers have dubbed “Gaia BH1”, fit the bill very well: all the available data were consistent.
Statistically speaking, the closeness implies that there should be numerous similar systems throughout the galaxy. Putting a number to the “numerous” is hard, though. But El-Badry and his colleagues have a fairly good estimate that the next big Gaia data release, DR4, currently expected not before the end of 2025, should allow for the discovery of dozens of similar systems.
Gaia BH1 is a spectacular find, but also a puzzling one. It is difficult to explain how a system like this could have formed in the first place. Specifically, the progenitor star that later turned into a black hole would be expected to have had a mass of at least 20 solar masses, which means its lifetime would have been very short – on the order of a few million years.
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