The closest black hole to us.

The black hole that they have found has about 12 times the mass of the Sun and is located about 1550 light years away, with 12 times the mass of the Sun, which is a very respectable mass, it would be within the so-called stellar mass black holes, which is very far from the most intermediate black holes ranging from 100 to a million solar masses, and of course it would be very far from super massive black holes with several million solar masses.

The most important black hole for us is Sagittarius A*, located in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, about 26,000 light years away from Earth and with an estimated mass of about 4.3 million times the mass of the sun. which is a monster.

But the finding in this case is also very remarkable and important first because it breaks a record as the closest black hole discovered to date, in 2020 a team of astronomers led by the European Southern Observatory announced the discovery of a black hole closer to about a thousand light-years away, but the results of that study were later disputed by several researchers.

The International Group based at the University of KU Leuven in Belgium demonstrated in this year of 2022 that what was seen in the binary system HR 6819 was not the product of a black hole, what was happening there is that one of the two stars was in a rare stage, a stage astronomers call stellar "vampirism" because the star was stealing material from its companion star, vampirizing it. Science is like that, you always have to review the findings, check the data and compare them with the new observations that are made, on the way to find the truth, making mistakes is an option, but correcting is mandatory.

The second reason why this latest finding is very important is because finding this type of stellar black hole is very difficult. The team of scientists analyzed data from almost 200,000 binary stars provided by the Gaia space observatory mission of the european space agency The strategy followed by scientists was to look for binary systems, that is, with two components, systems that had large masses, but whose brightness could only be attributed to a visible star. The researchers concluded that this star had to have a dark and high-mass companion, it is true that there are options for small and dim stars that can accompany a normal star, but with this strategy they were able to reduce the number of binary systems 200,000 to a group that they could study in detail, and among that group that they could study in detail, they found a visible star orbiting a more massive black hole. The star takes 185 days to orbit that black hole, it does so at a safe distance and also, according to the researchers, there are no indications that the star is approaching the black hole, in reality, keeping the appropriate distance, it could be orbiting it for thousands of millions of years in the same way that a planet orbits its star.

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