The most massive known stellar black hole in our Milky Way to date – the giant called ‘Gaia BH3’ – has about 33 times the mass of our Sun.
Stellar black holes found so far in the Milky Way measure on average only ten times the mass of the Sun, the previously largest known – “Cygnus X-1” – about 21 times the mass of the Sun.
Stellar black holes form from stars. “No one expected that there would be a huge black hole lurking nearby that has gone unnoticed until now,” European Southern Observatory (Eso) astronomer Pasquale Panuzzo of the Observatoire de Paris quoted as saying.
Black hole only 2000 light years away
‘You only make these kinds of discoveries once in your research life.’ According to Eso, the black hole is extremely close to Earth, at a distance of ‘only’ 2000 light years. A light year is the distance light travels in one year: a distance of 9.46 trillion kilometers.
The black hole’s companion star is set into a kind of tumbling motion by its massive companion – and this was noticeable. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) ‘Gaia’ mission aims to record the positions, motions, distances and brightness of nearly two billion celestial bodies.
Black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. They are formed when large stars with many times the mass of our Sun explode as supernovae at the end of their existence and the remaining star collapses.
In addition to stellar black holes, there are also supermassive black holes that are suspected to reside at the centers of most galaxies. These black holes can have billions of times the mass of our sun. The most massive in our galaxy is “Sagittarius A*” at the center of the Milky Way, which is about four million times more massive than the Sun.
Source: Krone
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