Scientists Discovered a Monstrous Black Hole Too Close to Earth

Story by Jodie Williams • Yesterday 2:48 PM

Black holes are dark, matter-devouring balls of gravity. Most of them are so far away that we don’t need to worry about them. But not this one. Meet Gaia BH1. This enormous black hole sits right outside our Solar System. More specifically, 1,600 light-years away from us. Now, that might sound like a huge distance. But it’s way closer than any other black hole on record. What’s worse, we didn’t know about it until now.

Despite Gaia BH1 being 10 times more massive than our Sun, we couldn’t see it. Scientists usually discover these monstrosities by spotting the gas that a black hole feeds on. These hungry giants are called feeding black holes. Only Gaia BH1 isn’t anything like that. This black hole is dormant. It hides in the darkness, patiently waiting for the galaxy to throw it some cosmic matter to feast on. But there’s one thing that gave away Gaia’s presence. You see, most star systems in the Universe are binary. That means that they have not one, but two stars orbiting each other. Our black hole neighbor is also part of a binary star system. Except instead of two stars, this system has one star and one black hole. Yeah, Gaia BH1 was disguising itself as a star. Even though this monstrosity doesn’t feed on any gas or matter yet, it still couldn’t help jiggling its star counterpart a little. Good try, Gaia, but we still caught you.

Out there in space, there are black holes a lot scarier than Gaia BH1. Some are so bizarre that they shouldn’t even exist. A team of scientists discovered an unbelievable black hole and gave it the melodic name LB-1. The weird thing about this black hole is that it’s just too massive to be true. OK, let’s get some facts straight. We know of two types of black holes. Stellar black holes are what massive stars become when they die. They are everywhere in the Universe. Even in our Milky Way galaxy, there could be as many as one billion of them lurking around. These beasts can be between 10 and 24 times as massive as our Sun.

The other type of black holes are supermassive ones. These enormities sit at the center of almost every galaxy, including our own. We don’t really know how they form, but we do know that they are unimaginably gigantic. Billions of times more massive than our Sun. But LB-1 doesn’t fit either of these types. At 70 solar masses, it’s too enormous to be a stellar black hole, yet it’s too tiny to be a supermassive one. Scientists were scratching their heads trying to explain this phenomenon. Some theorized that it might not be a single black hole, but two black holes orbiting each other. Others guessed that LB-1 was born of a gigantic star that was still in the middle of becoming a black hole. The answer was simpler than we thought. LB-1 isn’t a black hole at all. It’s an optical illusion caused by two rare stars orbiting each other. It’s a unique star system to stargaze. But when scientists said they found an improbable black hole, they were wrong. But, please, how could you blame them? It’s hard to study an object 15,000 light-years away. Mistakes happen. The good news is that LB-1 didn’t upend our understanding of black holes after all.

More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-discovered-a-monstrous-black-hole-too-close-to-earth/ar-AA1aiXft