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The European Space Agency (ESA) has detected a ‘sleeping giant’ black hole, looking at data from the ESA Gaia mission. The space agency said that they have detected a massive black hole which is thirty-three times larger than the Sun.
ESA further revealed that the sleeping giant black hole is only 2000 light years away from Earth.
“This is the first time that such a massive black hole of stellar origin has been observed in our galaxy, the Milky Way,” ESA said.
ESA says that this giant black hole was hidden in the Aquila constellation.
ESA explains that a black hole is so densely packed with matter that nothing can escape its immense gravitational pull, not even light.
Most stellar-mass black holes are known to swallow the mass of a nearby companion star.
Scientists further explain that the captured material falls onto the collapsed object at high speed, becomes extremely hot and emits X-rays. These systems belong to a family of celestial objects called X-ray binaries.
When a black hole has no companion close enough to steal matter, it produces no light and is extremely difficult to detect. These black holes are called ‘inactive’.
When the data were studied, ESA scientists found that the star was locked in an orbital motion with a dormant black hole with an exceptionally high mass, about 33 times that of the Sun.
ESA says this is the third dormant black hole detected with Gaia and it is aptly named ‘Gaia BH3’.
The object’s discovery is extremely exciting due to its mass. “This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life,” says Pasquale Panuzzo of the CNRS, Observatoire de Paris in France, lead author of the discovery. “So far, black holes this massive have only ever been detected in distant galaxies by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, thanks to the observation of gravitational waves.”
The average mass of known black holes of stellar origin in our Galaxy is about 10 times the mass of our Sun. Until now, the weight record was held by a black hole in an X-ray binary in the Cygnus constellation (Cyg X-1), whose mass is estimated to be about 20 times the mass of the Sun.
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Published: April 18, 2024, 06:54 PM IST
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