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Related article<\/span> Brightest known object in the universe was hiding in plain sight for decades, researchers say<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The wobbling movement of an old giant star in the Aquila constellation revealed that it was in an orbital dance with a dormant black hole, and it\u2019s the third such dormant black hole spotted by Gaia. <\/p>\n
The researchers used the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope in Chile\u2019s Atacama Desert and other ground-based observatories to confirm the mass of Gaia BH3, and their study has also offered new clues to how such huge black holes came to be. The findings appeared Tuesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. <\/p>\n
\u201cNo one was expecting to find a high-mass black hole lurking nearby, undetected so far,\u201d said lead study author Pasquale Panuzzo, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris, part of France\u2019s National Centre for Scientific Research, and a Gaia collaboration member, in a statement. \u201cThis is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life.\u201d <\/p>\n
The title for the most massive black hole in our galaxy will always belong to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole located at the center of the Milky Way, which has about 4 million times the mass of the sun, but that is because it\u2019s a supermassive black hole, rather than a stellar black hole. <\/p>\n
The process by which supermassive black holes form is poorly understood, but one theory suggests it happens when massive cosmic clouds collapse. Stellar black holes form when massive stars die. So Gaia BH3 is the most massive black hole in our galaxy that formed from the death of a massive star. <\/p>\n
Stellar black holes observed across the Milky Way galaxy are about 10 times as massive as the sun on average. Until the discovery of Gaia BH3, the largest known stellar black hole in our galaxy was Cygnus X-1, which is 21 times the mass of the sun. While Gaia BH3 is an exceptional find within our galaxy by astronomers\u2019 standards, it is similar in mass to objects found in very distant galaxies. <\/p>\n
Scientists believe stellar black holes with masses such as Gaia BH3\u2019s formed when metal-poor stars collapsed. These stars, which include hydrogen and helium as their heaviest elements, are thought to lose less mass over their lifetimes, so they have more material at the end that can result in a high-mass black hole. <\/p>\n
But astronomers hadn\u2019t been able to find evidence directly linking high-mass black holes and metal-poor stars until they found Gaia BH3. <\/p>\n
The study authors said that paired stars tend to be similar in composition. True to expectations, the researchers found that the star orbiting Gaia BH3 was metal-poor, which means that the star that formed Gaia BH3 was likely the same. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat strikes me is that the chemical composition of the companion is similar to what we find in old metal-poor stars in the galaxy,\u201d said study coauthor Elisabetta Caffau, a Gaia collaboration member at the Observatoire de Paris, in a statement. <\/p>\n
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Related article<\/span> Our galaxy\u2019s black hole spins fast and drags space-time with it, scientists say<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The star orbiting Gaia BH3 likely formed in the first 2 billion years after the big bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago. The star\u2019s trajectory, which moves in the opposite direction of many stars in the galactic disk of the Milky Way, suggests it was part of a small galaxy that merged with the Milky Way more than 8 billion years ago. <\/p>\n
Now, the team hopes the research can allow other astronomers to study the colossal black hole and uncover more of its secrets without having to wait for the rest of the Gaia data release, slated for late 2025. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s impressive to see the transformational impact Gaia is having on astronomy and astrophysics,\u201d said Carole Mundell, the European Space Agency\u2019s director of science, in a statement. \u201cIts discoveries are reaching far beyond the original purpose of the mission, which is to create an extraordinarily precise multi-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout our Milky Way.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Astronomers have spotted the most massive known stellar black hole in the Milky Way galaxy after detecting an unusual wobble in space. The so-called \u201csleeping giant,\u201d named Gaia BH3, has a mass that is nearly 33 times that of our sun, and it\u2019s located 1,926 light-years away in the Aquila constellation, making it the second-closest <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1977,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1976","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}