A new discovery has discovered that the black hole closest to Earth is not a black hole at all

The black hole closest to Earth is not a black hole at all. while the Astronomers say It’s just a two star system, one sucking life out of the other.

After all, the black hole closest to Earth is not a black hole

In 2020, that was the mission he’s leading European Southern Observatory I mentioned the discovery of a black hole near the Earth. In fact, it was just over 1,000 light-years away. This makes it the closest black hole we’ve ever discovered from our planet. Now, despite reanalyzing the data, astronomers say the system they discovered HR6819It does not have a black hole at all.

When it was first discovered, astronomers thought HR6819 was a three-star system. They also believed that two stars orbited a black hole. However, a Study led by Julia Bodensteiner, then a Ph.D. As a student at KU Leuven in Belgium, he searched for an alternative option.

Bodensteiner said HR6819 could be a two-star system without a black hole. This option means that in the past one of the stars in the system had to be stripped. Essentially, one star could have lost a lot of its mass in favor of the other, leading to the effect that astronomers have observed. This alternative still leaves astronomers with a mystery to be solved.

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Another study was created around the same time as the Bodensteiner study group of researchers He was also looking for discoveries. They also found that the system was most likely a two-star system, with one subtracting mass from the other. a The third study He also found that the black hole closest to Earth was not a black hole either.

In this third study, astronomers Karim El-Badri and Elliot Quatrate of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed the system’s spectra. They found that the mass of one star was greater than the mass of the other star. Therefore, the lone star is more bloated and appears to have recently stripped and shrunk into a hot secondary dwarf.

Bodensteiner’s team has joined another team led by KU Leaven researcher Abigail Frost to investigate the discovery further. Two years after its discovery, the team says the closest black hole to Earth is actually just a two star system, with one star pulling resources from another.

“Our best explanation so far is that we detected this binary system immediately, shortly after a star absorbed the atmosphere from its companion star,” Bodensteiner said. wrote in a statement Featured on the ESO website. She also says that repetition is very common in tight binaries. When one star pulled material from the other, the receiver began to spin faster.

It was this rapid rotation that helped create the illusion that the closest black hole to Earth had been born. a vampire star It’s still pretty scary, but at least we can be confident that there’s no black hole less than 1,500 light-years away.