Using Gaia data scientists discover the heaviest stellar black hole ever found
In digging into the precise motion data from the Gaia space telescope scientists have discovered the Milky Way’s heaviest stellar-sized black hole, with a mass thirty-three times the mass of our Sun.
Stellar black holes are formed from the collapse of massive stars and the ones previously identified in the Milky Way are on average about 10 times as massive as the Sun. Even the next most massive stellar black hole known in our galaxy, Cygnus X-1, only reaches 21 solar masses, making this new 33-solar-mass observation exceptional.
Remarkably, this black hole is also extremely close to us — at a mere 2000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila, it is the second-closest known black hole to Earth.
The only known black hole inside the Milky Way that is larger is Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), the supermassive central black hole at the galaxy’s center and weighing over four million solar masses. That creature is a very different thing, as it involves the long term evolution of the galaxy itself. Stellar-sized black holes only involve the death of a single star, with possible additions from a handful of others.
In digging into the precise motion data from the Gaia space telescope scientists have discovered the Milky Way’s heaviest stellar-sized black hole, with a mass thirty-three times the mass of our Sun.
Stellar black holes are formed from the collapse of massive stars and the ones previously identified in the Milky Way are on average about 10 times as massive as the Sun. Even the next most massive stellar black hole known in our galaxy, Cygnus X-1, only reaches 21 solar masses, making this new 33-solar-mass observation exceptional.
Remarkably, this black hole is also extremely close to us — at a mere 2000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila, it is the second-closest known black hole to Earth.
The only known black hole inside the Milky Way that is larger is Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), the supermassive central black hole at the galaxy’s center and weighing over four million solar masses. That creature is a very different thing, as it involves the long term evolution of the galaxy itself. Stellar-sized black holes only involve the death of a single star, with possible additions from a handful of others.