A New Discovery of a 'Sleeping Giant' Blackhole Has Scientists Baffled
The European Space Agency (ESA) just published a new report. With it comes the discovery of the biggest black hole in the Milky Way.
As part of the agency's Gaia mission, the scientists revealed that a "sleeping giant" of a black hole exists in the galaxy. The average mass of known black holes of stellar origin is only 10 times the mass of the sun. This apparently broke the record for such.
It has a mass of about 33 times the mass of the Sun, less than 2,000 light years away from the Earth. This marks the first time a black hole of stellar origin of this size has appeared in the Milky Way. Such black holes in the past had only been situated in very distant galaxies.
“This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life,” explains Pasquale Panuzzo of CNRS, Observatoire de Paris, in France, lead author of this finding. “So far, black holes this big have only ever been detected in distant galaxies by the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration, thanks to observations of gravitational waves.”
An image of the black hole in question.
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According to the ESA, the new research challenges our understanding of stars and how they evolve.
Gaia BH3 is another dormant black hole. Most stellar-mass black holes suck in matter from nearby stars. The material then falls into the black hole at high speeds, leading to it heating up and releasing X-ray radiation. When there aren't stars close enough to get matter from, they don't create any light. These are what are called "dormant" black holes.
Interestingly, the star orbiting Gaia BH3 at about 16 times the distance between the sun and Earth, which is uncommon. It is said to be an ancient giant star that might have formed in the first two billion years after the Big Bang.
The said star belongs to the family of the Galactic stellar halo, moving in the opposite direction to the stars of the Galactic disc. Researchers assert that its trajectory indicates that the star was part of a small galaxy or globular cluster that was engulfed by our own about eight billion years ago.
It is believed that this "companion" supports the theory that high-mass black holes observed by gravitational wave experiments were"produced by the collapse of primeval massive stars poor in heavy elements." Early stars may have evolved differently from the stars we have in our galaxy.
Learn more about the findings of the Gaia mission here.
