![]() Thanks to the discovery, and subsequent imaging, of a black hole located in M87, about 55 million light-years from Earth, in 2019, science has once again shown that Einstein's theory was on the right track. Friction happens within the disk, which generates large amounts of light radiation that can be seen and measured by astronomers. ![]() ![]() Sometimes, more matter collects around the event horizon than the black hole can take in at once, so it all gathers in orbit around the black hole and forms an accretion disk. The theory of general relativity also gave rise to the prediction of black holes: Infinitely dense points in space, surrounded by event horizons, where nothing - not even light - can escape. Rendering that shows the warping around Earth that demonstrates gravity Source: NASA/MSFC/Stanford University artist's concept The larger and more dense the object, the stronger the gravitational pull. This warping leads to our most basic understanding of gravity - it is the result of the warping of spacetime. Much of what Einstein proposed in the theory has since been confirmed by experiments, such as one that showed the fabric of spacetime is warped by objects with extreme gravitational fields (which was originally done by observing the bending of light during a solar eclipse). “It poses many questions about how this binary system was formed, as well as how many of these dormant black holes there are out there,” El-Badry said in the statement.Although Einsteing himself argued against the existence of black holes, their existence was originally derived from Einstein's formulation of what is now known as the theory of general relativity, which is one of the most important theories in the history of physics. The researchers aren't sure why the star wasn’t consumed as its partner star expanded, died and formed the black hole. Its nearby star is about the same size as our sun, and the two objects are roughly as far from each other as our sun and Earth are, per the Times. The researchers then used observations from other telescopes, including one run by NOIRLab, to support the theory that this mystery object was a black hole.Ĭompared to the previously nearest-known black hole, this one is three times closer to Earth, per the statement. The scientists noticed a star in the constellation Ophiuchus moving in unexpected ways, and they realized that the gravity of an unknown, massive object was to blame, according to a statement from the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab). But El-Badry and his colleagues found a hint to this one’s existence in data from the European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, which tracks the positions and movements of stars in the Milky Way, per the Times. Though dormant black holes are more common, they can be harder to spot. But as active black holes gobble up nearby material, they emit X-rays that point scientists to their existence, per the Times.īut dormant black holes, like the newly discovered one, are not feeding and therefore don’t emit X-rays. Since no light leaves a black hole, scientists cannot observe one directly. These dense objects have incredibly strong gravitational pulls from which nothing, including light itself, can escape. They leave behind the mass of at least several suns, tightly packed into a relatively small space: the black hole. ![]() When stars roughly ten times the mass of the sun or bigger reach the ends of their lives, they collapse in powerful supernova explosions. Most black holes are born from the deaths of large stars, according to NASA. “Just finding one… suggests there are a bunch more to be found.” “We think there are probably a lot that are closer,” Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says to Science News ’ Lisa Grossman. With so many more undetected, the newly discovered black hole shouldn’t hold the title of “closest to Earth” forever, suggests their paper published last week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. While scientists have only spotted about 20 black holes in the Milky Way to date, they estimate that some 100 million more are lurking in our galaxy, each between 5 and 100 times more massive than our sun. It’s about ten times as massive as our sun and is located just 1,600 light-years away-rather nearby on a cosmic scale. Astronomers have discovered a black hole closer to Earth than any other previously found.
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