Gaia BH3 Black Hole – Earth’s Closest Monster

Yes! It’s Gaia BH3 black hole the cosmic giant hiding in plain sight within our galaxy. Just like a backyard can host all sorts of unseen visitors able to evade detection, recently astronomers popped open the lid on one such hidden behemoth in the Milky Way. This is not just an important discovery; it marks the most massive stellar-mass black hole ever spotted, and that’s right here on Earth in cosmic terms.

This discovery is pushing everything we thought we knew about our cosmic neighborhood, pointing to the possibility that perhaps the universe has some big secrets up its sleeve just out of sight.

About The Gaia Spacecraft

As we celebrate the launch of the Gaia spacecraft in 2013, we have a lot to be excited about! The mission of the spacecraft is to create the most accurate 3D maps of celestial bodies, including 1 billion stars, planets, comets, asteroids, and quasars.

Using the Gaia Spacecraft, scientists have mapped the motion and positions of stars in the Milky Way with the highest accuracy yet. The Gaia Spacecraft was located at the L2 Lagrange Point, 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.

A Lagrange Point is a point in space where two massive bodies orbit each other and their gravitational influence balances. Spacecraft can park at these points without worrying about the gravitational force pulling them towards them from both large bodies.

Gaia DR1, Gaia DR2, and Gaia DR3 will release data two more times before the end of their mission in 2025. During its more than 10-year mission duration, Gaia Spacecraft has released data three times.

Closest Black Hole To Earth (Gaia BH1)

In 2022, Gaia BH1 was found to be the closest black hole to Earth. It is 1560 light years away and is located in the constellation Ophiuchus. In a binary system, our Sun is surrounded by a stellar-mass black hole about 10 solar masses in size. Astronomers believe this is the closest system containing a black hole and a Sun-like star to our Sun as of April 2024.

Another system in Gaia’s data was found in 2023. It is the Gaia BH2 system, which is 3,800 light-years away in the Centaurus constellation and contains a red giant star as well as a star with a mass of 9 solar masses.

How Big Is Gaia Bh3 Black Hole

In the third Gaia Spacecraft dataset, both of these systems were detected. It is expected that the fourth Gaia data set will not be available until 2025, but when astronomers examined the raw data, they discovered a system in which a G-class star was visible 1926 light years away towards Aquila, whose orbit strangely orbited an invisible, extremely heavy object.

Unlike the expectations, Scientists discovered that it was not only a stellar-mass black hole, but also the most massive stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way galaxy.

According to astronomers, the black hole is 33 times heavier than our Sun. As the second closest system to us after Gaia BH1, Gaia BH3 has been given the name Gaia BH3.

“None of us were expecting to find such a high-mass black hole lurking around, which was unknown until now,” said Pasquale Panuzzo of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration and the first author of the paper that describes this object. It’s a discovery you’ll only make once in your life.

Stellar Mass Vs. Supermassive Black Hole

It is important to know that black holes fall into multiple categories based on their solar masses. There are also supermassive black holes, which have masses that are millions to billions of times that of the sun; these are found mainly in galaxies’ centers and their formation is still incomplete.

When massive stars go supernova, the cores collapse, forming stellar-mass black holes. These black holes can be as massive as the sun or even more massive if they merge with each other.

Detecting a black hole as we know it is very difficult because black holes as we know them do not produce light. It is expected that our Milky Way galaxy contains as many as 100 million stellar-mass black holes.

Detection Methods Of Stellar Black Hole

A black hole can occasionally cause flares in a star when it throws material from a passing companion star or binary companion star into interstellar space since this process produces a lot of heat and brightness. Without this, it is nearly impossible to detect these stellar-mass black holes. So far, we have only discovered about 20 of them, but there are definitely others.

There are a couple of ways we can detect these dormant stellar-mass black holes, and one of them does not involve the black holes themselves, but any stars in companion orbits, which are gravitationally bound to the black holes and are close enough but not too close to be swallowed. There is no evidence of a black hole in these stars’ orbits, as their companion object is hidden.

What We Know About Gaia BH3

There is not much we know about this system, but we know it orbits each other every 11.6 years. The two objects are separated by about 16 times the distance between Earth and the sun. While the black hole has about 33 solar masses, the star, on the other hand, is tiny, weighing only 76 percent of its mass but about five times its size.

Due to the lack of heavy elements in this star, it must have been very old, since stars only incorporated these elements into their formation after previous generations had produced them. Additionally, the star shows no pollution from material ejected during the supernova by the star that created the massive black hole, showing that they came together in their orbital dance only after the black hole was formed.

There is no clear explanation for how stars with cores 33 times the mass of the Sun could form a black hole. However, models suggest it could be accomplished if the metallicity of the giant star was low as well.

The fourth release of Gaia data is expected to reveal even more black holes, so hopefully this is only a taste of what is to come in the future.

Is Gaia BH3 A Threat To Earth

Despite its close proximity to us, this black hole goes unnoticed, quietly moving through space and minding its own business. Its existence was only discovered when we discovered a star in binary orbit with its motion can be accounted for only by stellar motion.

What threat does this black hole pose to us in the future? In short, not at all. This black hole’s gravitational field is as powerful as that of any star of this mass, and BH3 is simply doing its job. But this third inactive black hole discovered in the Gaia data raises a question: Are there more such monster black holes roaming around our neighborhood without being noticed?

There might be an invisible black hole lurking in the remote parts of our solar system, which periodically sends giant comets from the Oort cloud into our inner solar system. Do you also think the same? Please let me know by commenting. Did you know that scientists have discovered the oldest known star in our Milky Way Galaxy, yes! This is not Methuselah star (HD 140283) star, we are talking about is 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B. Thank you for your valuable time.

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