The closest black hole to Earth is not a black hole at all. Meanwhile, Astronomers say It’s just a two-star system where one star sucks life out of the other.
The closest black hole to Earth is not a black hole
Back in 2020, it was a mission he led European Southern Observatory I mentioned the discovery of a black hole near Earth. In fact, it lies just over 1,000 light years away. This makes it the closest black hole to our planet we have ever found. Now, despite reanalyzing the data, astronomers say the system they found, HR6819It doesn’t actually have a black hole at all.
When it was first discovered, astronomers thought HR6819 was a triple star system. They also believe that two stars orbit a black hole. However, Study led by Julia Bodensteiner, then a Ph.D. A student at KU Leuven in Belgium, he looked at alternative options.
Bodensteiner said HR6819 could be a two-star system with no black holes at all. This option means that one of the stars in the system must be stripped in the past. Basically, one star can lose a lot of mass in favor of another, causing the effects astronomers have observed. This alternative still leaves a mystery for astronomers to solve.
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At about the same time that the Bodensteiner study was conducted, another study a group of researchers He is also looking for inventions. They also found that the system was most likely a two-star system with one star pulling mass away from the other. a Third study He also determined that the black hole closest to Earth is not a black hole either.
In the third study, astronomers Karim El-Badri and Elliot Quatert of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed the spectrum of the system. They found that the mass of one star is greater than the mass of another. Thus, they say, the single star is more swollen and appears to have recently been stripped and contracted into a hot secondary dwarf.
Bodensteiner’s team joined forces with another team led by KU Leaven Abigail Frost to study the discovery in greater depth. Two years after its discovery, the team says the closest black hole to Earth is actually just a two-star system where one star draws resources from the other.
“Our best explanation so far is that we detect this binary system in an instant shortly after a star sucks the atmosphere from its companion star,” said Bodensteiner. write in a statement Featured on the ESO website. He also said that redundancy is very common in closed binary systems. As one star pulls matter from the other, the receiver begins to spin faster.
It is this fast rotation that helps create the illusion that the closest black hole to Earth was born. a vampire star It’s still pretty scary, but at least we can rest easy knowing that no black hole is less than 1,500 light-years away from us.
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