CAPE CANAVERAL: Only 1,600 light-years distant, astronomers have found the nearest black hole to the planet. It was revealed by scientists on Friday that this black hole is ten times as large as the sun. And compared to the previous record-holder, it is three times closer.
The companion star, which orbits the black hole at roughly the same distance as Earth orbits the sun, was used to identify it. Gaia, a spacecraft operated by the European Space Agency, was used to discover the black hole at first, according to Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The International Gemini Observatory in Hawaii was contacted by El-Badry and his group to corroborate their findings, which were then reported in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
How the system developed in the Milky Way is a mystery to the experts. It has the designation Gaia BH1 and is found in the serpent-bearer constellation Ophiuchus.