Astronomers Discover Dormant Black Hole 1600 lightyears from Earth

As explained by NASA, a black hole is a place in space where matter has been condensed into an extremely tight space, often from a dying star. The force of gravity is so strong inside of a black hole that nothing can escape it, not even light.1 Black holes are optically invisible and impossible to detect via cameras. Scientists can only find black holes by analyzing the pull of gravity on the gasses surrounding the black holes. Black holes come in many sizes. There are black holes estimated to be the size of one atom with the mass of a mountain. Other black holes can be “supermassive,” which is precisely what it sounds like. Stellar black holes can have masses up to 100 times that of our sun. 

Recently, astronomers used the Gemini North telescope in Hawai’i (which could be an excellent class field trip…) to observe a black hole a mere 1600 lightyears from Earth. Assuming light from the sun takes around 8 minutes to reach Earth, our sun is only 0.00001581 light years away. Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, explained the significance of the discovery of a Sun-like star orbiting an unseen, massive object with a gravitational pull strong enough to cause minute irregularities in the orbit of the star: "While there have been many claimed detections of systems like this, almost all these discoveries have subsequently been refuted. This is the first unambiguous detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our Galaxy."2 This discovery has led astronomers to question the previously-understood way in which binary star systems form. It led the astronomers to question how one of the stars in the system is so normal when the other is a supermassive black hole. 

1. https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-k4.html

2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/11/221104113504.htm