Stellar black holes form from the collapse of massive stars, and those identified so far in the Milky Way are on average about 10 times more massive than the Sun.
A team of astronomers has identified the most massive stellar black hole to date in the universe. milky way With a mass 33 times greater than… sunI reported this Tuesday European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The black hole was discovered in data from the Gaia mission, a space observatory run by NASA European Space Agency (ESA) Which probes the sky from Earth's orbit in order to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the Milky Way.
Data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and other ground-based observatories were used to verify the mass of the black hole, which was found to be 33 times the mass of the Sun.
This discovery was possible because the black hole imposes something strange “sway” movement. The companion star it orbits around.
Stellar black holes form from the collapse of massive stars, and those identified so far in the Milky Way are on average about 10 times more massive than the Sun.
Until the next most massive stellar black hole known in our galaxy, Chicken X-1Its mass reaches only 21 solar masses, which makes this new observation exceptional.
The European Southern Observatory also highlighted that surprisingly, this black hole is also very close to Earth 2000 light years awayin a constellation AquilaIt is the second closest known black hole.
nickname Gaia BH3 or BH3 In short, this was discovered when the team was reviewing Gaia's observations while preparing a new data release.
“No one expected to find a supermassive black hole lurking nearby that has not yet been discovered,” he said. Pasquale Panozzo, a member of the Gaia Collaboration and an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, part of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). “This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research career,” he stressed.
The astronomical community has previously discovered similar massive black holes outside our galaxy, and hypothesized that they might form from the collapse of stars whose chemical composition contains very few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
It is believed that these stars Poor minerals They lose less mass throughout their lives, so they have more material left over to produce high-mass black holes after they die.
But so far there is no evidence directly linking metal-poor stars to high-mass black holes.
Star pairs tend to have similar compositions, meaning BH3's companion holds important clues about the star that collapsed to form this extraordinary black hole, ESO explains.
That companion was a very metal-poor star, suggesting that the star that collapsed to form BH3 was also metal-poor, as expected.
