![]() To confirm their observations, the team analyzed radial velocity measurements of Gaia BH1 from multiple telescopes. This tightened our constraints on the companion's mass and proved that it is really 'dark.'" In order to confirm that the Gaia solution is correct and rule out non-black hole alternatives, we observed the star spectroscopically with several other telescopes. The size of the orbit and its period give us a constraint on the mass of its unseen companion-about 10 solar masses. "The Gaia data constrain how the star moves in the sky, tracing out an ellipse as it orbits the black hole. Based on its observed orbital solution, El-Badry and his colleagues determined that this star must have a black hole binary companion. ![]() Their analysis found a particularly promising candidate, a G-type (yellow star) designated Gaia DR3 4373465352415301632-for their purposes, the team designated it Gaia BH1. "My previous attempts turned up a diverse menagerie of binaries that masquerade as black holes, but this was the first time the search has borne fruit."įor their purposes, El-Badry and his colleagues examined all 168,065 stars in the Gaia Data Release 3 (GDR3) that appeared to have two-body orbits. "I've been searching for dormant black holes for the last four years using a wide range of datasets and methods," he said. The paper that describes their findings will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.Īs El-Badry explained to Universe Today via email, these observations were part of a wider campaign to identify dormant black hole companions to normal stars in the Milky Way galaxy. ![]() He was joined by researchers from CfA, MPIA, Caltech, UC Berkely, the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Observatoire de Paris, MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and multiple universities. The research was led by Kareem El-Badry, a Harvard Society Fellow astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). This makes it the nearest black hole to our solar system and implies the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in our galaxy. Due to the nature of its orbit, the team concluded that it must be part of a black hole binary system. According to a recent study, an international research team relied on data from the ESA's Gaia Observatory to observe a sun-like star with strange orbital characteristics. These observations are an opportunity to test the laws of physics under the most extreme conditions and offer insights into the forces that shaped the universe.
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