A “sleeper” hole close to the ground – launch

Astronomers have discovered the Milky Way’s first inactive black hole, which emits no radiation and is only betrayed by its attraction to a companion star. Close to our planet, indicates that these stars are everywhere in the galaxy.

There is nothing you see in this place of the universe. no thing. No matter how powerful and sophisticated our telescopes are, we will never detect a single tiny ray of light, or gamma rays, or x-rays… an absolute vacuum. However, the star revolves around this place. This can only mean one thing: there is a black hole lurking in the shadows, discreet and inactive, but has betrayed its existence through its own gravity. It is the closest black hole to our solar system.

An international team of researchers made the discovery by combing through data from Gaia, the European satellite that has created the most comprehensive maps of the Milky Way. Gaia has been installed in space since 2014, and has observed and recorded the movement of 1.46 billion stars in our Milky Way. The latest and most comprehensive catalog of data was published in June of this year and provides invaluable raw material for astrophysicists.

complicated to check

This is how Karim El-Badri and his team encountered our neighbor’s black hole. “In the summer of 2018, my moderators and I began searching for latent black holes surrounded by ordinary, low-mass stars.says the young American astronomer…