Black holes are one of the largest sources of doubts and mysteries since its theoretical postulation made by the German physicist Albert Einstein. They are formed from collapse and the compression of the mass of giant stars into extremely small points, called singularitieswith severity levels extremely high. The region it covers is delimited by what is known as “event horizon” and any type of matter or energy that crosses it, even light, can’t get out again. Because of this, they can grow to unimaginable sizes.
The title of the supermassive black hole (SMBHfor its acronym in English) largest in the galaxy has it Sagittarius A*which makes up the center of the Milky Way. Its mass is four million suns, and it is located approximately 26,000 light years from Earth.
Now, a group of astronomers have managed to identify a supermassive black hole that is just 2,000 light years in the constellation of Aquila and would be the second largest in the entire galaxy.
The discovery of Gaia BH3 It was made possible thanks to the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency. In addition, data provided by the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) belonging to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) were used to analyze its properties and measure your mass accurately. The study was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
This amazing SMBH has 33 times the mass of the Sun. As a frame of reference, what was previously believed to be the second largest black hole in the Milky Way, Cygnus 21 solar masses.
“No one expected to find a massive black hole lurking nearby, undetected until now”commented Pasquale Panuzzo, the astronomer at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) of the Paris Observatory (PSL, France) who led the research.
The scientists decided to study it because they observed a unusual behavior in the star that orbits it. The high gravity exerted by Gaia BH3 causes the star to “wobble” as it travels around you.
The UVES data were used to examine the composition of this star, which turned out to be poor in metals, meaning that the celestial body that collapsed and created the black hole was also one. This conclusion was reached since grouped stars tend to be made up of similar items.
This finding has significant implications for the training theory of these dense bodies that absorb everything in their path. The ESO press release explains that astronomers “have theorized that they may form from the collapse of stars with very few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in their chemical composition. These metal-poor stars are believed to they lose less mass throughout their life and therefore they have more material left to produce high-mass black holes after they die.”
Until the discovery of Gaia BH3, scientists they had not been able to link to stars with little amounts of metals and the formation of black holes of that magnitude (and larger) that had been found outside the galaxy.
Co-author Elisabetta Caffau clarifies that they published the results before the complete Gaia data comes to light, which is dated for the year 2025, for “the unique nature of discovery”. Furthermore, in this way astronomers from all over the world will be able to begin studying this new black hole to understand it more deeply.
Future research on Gaia BH3 and its behavior may result in important revelations about the creation of black holes. For example, from the ESO they comment that a possible study would be through the use of the GRAVITY instrument, installed in the VLT interferometer, to “help astronomers discover if this black hole is attracting matter from its environment already.” better understand this exciting object”.
