Closest black hole to Earth could be ‘trillions of miles nearer’ than scientists previously thought
A NEW study has suggested that the nearest black hole to Earth could be 10 times closer than previously thought.
The study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
It looked at data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia Satellite.
Particularly, the data delved into the 650 million-year-old galactic history of a cluster of stars called the Hyades.
The Hyades is the nearest open cluster to Earth, located about 153 light-years away from the Sun.
After assessing the data on the stars, the team of scientists now believe that the closest black holes to Earth may actually be trillions of miles nearer in the Hyades.
“Our simulations can only simultaneously match the mass and size of the Hyades if some black holes are present at the center of the cluster today (or until recently),” lead author Stefano Torniamenti, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua in Italy, said in a statement.
If their predictions are confirmed, these black holes would be the closest ones to Earth detected yet.
They would be only 150 light-years from our planet, which is around 10 times closer than the Gaia BH1 black hole – the current record holder.
The Gaia BH1 black hole is located around 1,500 light-years away from Earth.
The team of scientists explained that these new findings would not have been possible without the Gaia space telescope.
Thanks to the instrument, it’s possible for the first time to study the position and velocity of open cluster stars.
“This observation helps us understand how the presence of black holes affects the evolution of star clusters and how star clusters, in turn, contribute to gravitational wave sources”, says Mark Gieles, a member of the UB Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics and host of the first author in Barcelona.
“These results also give us insight into how these mysterious objects are distributed across the galaxy”.
The new study was conducted in close collaboration between the University of Padova, ICUBB-IEEC, the University of Cambridge, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the National Sun Yat-sen University in China.