Gaia-BH3 : Black Hole
Astronomers spotted the most massive known stellar black hole in the Milky Way galaxy named Gaia-BH3.
- Gaia-BH3 is the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy.
- It was spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission because it imposes an odd ‘wobbling’ motion on the companion star orbiting it.
- The researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert and other ground-based observatories to confirm the mass of Gaia BH3.
- It has a mass that is nearly 33 times that of our sun, and it’s located 1,926 light-years away in the Aquila constellation, making it the second-closest known black hole to Earth.
- The closest black hole is Gaia BH1, which is located about 1,500 light-years away and has a mass that is nearly 10 times that of our sun.
- The title for the most massive black hole in our galaxy will always belong to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole located at the center of the Milky Way, which has about 4 million times the mass of the sun, but that is because it’s a supermassive black hole, rather than a stellar black hole.
- Stellar-mass black holes are formed from the gravitational collapse of a single star or from the merger of two neutron stars. Therefore, they have masses similar to the masses of stars.
