Scientists Discover the Nearest Black Hole to Our Solar System Ever Found

Astronomers recently discovered the closest known black hole to our solar system. Scientists estimate that the black hole is 1,570 lightyears away and ten times the size of our sun.

The research, known as Gaia BH1, was headed by Harvard Society Fellow astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry, in collaboration with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA).

El-Badry also collaborated with scientists from CfA, MPIA, Caltech, UC Berkeley, the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Observatoire de Paris, MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and other institutions.

Their study report, which summarizes their observations, will be published in the Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices.

According to El-Badry, these observations were part of a broader research project to identify dormant black hole companions to stars in the Milky Way galaxy. “I’ve been searching for dormant black holes for the last four years using a wide range of datasets and methods,” he said.

He added: “My previous attempts turned up a diverse menagerie of binaries that masquerade as black holes, but this was the first time the search has borne fruit.”

El-Badry and his colleagues conducted the investigation using data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia Observatory. They've spent over a decade studying the positions, distances, and motions of nearly one billion celestial objects, including stars, planets, comets, asteroids, and galaxies.

A Polish astronomer has proposed a bizarre notion regarding black holes

Because to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and NASA's impending Artemis Missions, as well as their previous outstanding snaps, there has been a rebirth of interest in space travel in the last year. Space travel and black holes have also become popular subjects as a result of this. According to Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski, getting up close and personal with black holes and multiverses could be on the horizon.

“Our entire universe could exist inside a black hole that in turn is part of another universe,” he said in an interview.

Black holes range in size from microscopic to massive, according to scientists. The largest black hole discovered to date is located about 8.5 billion lightyears away in the Phoenix Galaxy cluster. With a diameter of 590 billion kilometres, the black hole is approximately 100 billion times larger than the sun. Furthermore, it accounts for around 10% of the mass of our Milky Way galaxy.

Nikodem also speculates that black holes could be our portal to the multiverse. He defined a baby universe as "a separate, closed spacetime branch with its own timeline."

He also claimed that the baby universe is always bigger than the parent black hole “because it is on the other side of the event horizon. It is like Tardis in Doctor Who. You enter the police box, and you realize that you are in something bigger than the box.”

Reference(s): Royal Astronomical Society's Monthly Notices