Scientists Found A Black Hole Very Close To Earth

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A team from the European Southern Observatory just found one that’s much closer than any previous recorded black hole. It’s barely 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Telescopium. In astronomical terms, this black hole is right in our neighborhood. You don’t actually need a telescope to see this solar system.

In a trinary star system, two of the stars orbit each other as a binary pair, while the third star orbits the pair at a greater distance. This ensures that the system is stable if the inner and outer orbits were the same size, one of the stars would eventually be ejected from the system. In the case of QV Telescopii system, one of the two visible stars orbits an invisible object every 40 days, while the other visible star orbits farther away. By studying the orbit of the star in the inner pair, the team was able to detect the black hole's presence and also calculate its mass. The ESO team estimated that the invisible third element has about four times the mass of the sun. That can only be a black hole.

Before this discovery, the closest known black hole was about 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros.

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Credit: ESO