An international team of scientists, including researchers from Portugal, has identified the densest stellar black hole in the Milky Way, with a mass 33 times that of the Sun, the European Southern Observatory (OES) reported on Tuesday.
The black hole – a dense body from whose gravity nothing, not even light, escapes – was discovered in data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission through the strange “oscillating” motion it causes in the star orbiting it, OES said in a statement adds that the mass of the BH3 black hole was calculated based on information obtained by the OES VLT telescope in Chile and other ground-based telescopes.
André Moitinho and Marcia Barros, researchers and professors at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the University of Lisbon, signed the work, published in the specialized journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Stellar black holes are formed by the explosion of a large star, and those in the Milky Way are on average less dense than BH3 – they are about 10 times the mass of the Sun.
BH3 is located 2,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Agia, and is the “second closest black hole” to the “blue planet,” says OES, the astronomical organization of which Portugal is a part.
Data collected by the VLT show that the companion of the star orbiting the black hole is metal-poor, suggesting, according to the authors of the paper, that “a star that collapses to form BH3 will also be metal-poor as predicted by theory.”
ESA’s Gaia mission was launched in 2013 and has a probe in space to map the Milky Way, the galaxy that contains the solar system of which Earth is a part.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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