There’s a black hole out there that’s left over from a young star that died.
Astronomers have found the closes back hole to Earth, and near, you can see two stars – with the naked eye. The black hole is about 1,000 light-years away. Keep in mind that each light-year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). But it is in our neighborhood. There was once another black hole near to us, at about 3.200 light-years.
The discovery of the black hole, that’s in the constellation Telescopium, shows that, actually, there are many more there. Astronomers believe that there are from 100 million to 1 billion small and dense objects in the Milky Way. But we cannot see them. We cannot even see the light. Astronomers find them when they’re gobbling up sections of stars near them, or objects falling into them. They also believe that most black holes out there do not have anything close enough for them to swallow. This is why they go undetected. They did find this one because of the unusual orbit of a star. This black hole was actually part of a three-star dance in a system called HR6819. The other two are not close enough to be sucked in by the black hole.
By using the telescope in Chile, they confirmed that there was an object of about four or five times the mass of our sun, that was pulling on the inner star. That could only be a black hole.
According to Todd Thompson, an astronomer from the Ohio State University, “It will motivate additional searches among bright, relatively nearby stars.” The co-author of the study also had something to say about the black hole: “Washington, D.C. would quite easily fit into the black hole, and once it went in it, would never come back.”
