Scientists from the Ohio State University (OSU) claim to have discovered the closest black hole to Earth. Their study suggests that the black hole is just 1,500 light-years away, which isn’t a huge distance in astronomical terms.
The team has named the black hole “The Unicorn” because it is located in the Monoceros constellation and also because it is one-of-a-kind, as per the university’s press release.
What’s unique about The Unicorn?
What makes this black hole unique is its surprisingly small size for a black hole. It’s only three times the mass of the Sun; until now astronomers didn’t even believe it was possible for a black hole to be this tiny.
The team of researchers didn’t image the black hole directly, but they discovered something uncanny behavior with a nearby red giant star. They found that an invisible object appeared to be locked in the planet’s gravity and exerting a strong tug of its own that it reshaped the star as it orbited.
“The simplest explanation is that it’s a black hole,” said Todd Thompson, study co-author in the release, “and in this case, the simplest explanation is the most likely one.”
Tiny black holes mystery
The new study will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It’s the latest addition to Thompson’s work to understand tiny black holes. Discovering tiny black holes like The Unicorn helps astronomers unfold the mysteries of star formation and their collapse.
“I think the field is pushing toward this, to really map out how many low-mass, how many intermediate-mass, and how many high-mass black holes there are,” Thompson added, “because every time you find one it gives you a clue about which stars collapse, which explode and which are in between.”
NASA recently visualized how two black holes interact with each other. Black holes have extremely powerful gravitational pulls, so strong that they even swallow light around them. But this doesn’t make them invisible. They have a structure called an accretion disk around them, which is made up of dust and gas clouds. NASA’s visualization shows how their gravity warps the accretion disk of the other.
