This black hole, located just 1,600 light-years away, is the closest known black hole to Earth.

The nearest to us is a stellar-mass black hole called Gaia BH1 which is located at a distance of 1600 light years.

Gaia BH1 was identified in the year 2022 employing the Gaia spacecraft along with multiple other telescopes including the 6. Ks band imaging at the 5m Magellan Baade telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on Gemini North.

It is now the nearest known black hole to earth breaking previous record holder with a distance of 1,500 light years. Its discovery was made through the observation of an unusual motion from its stellar counterpart by ESA’s Gaia space telescope which is an equivalent of the Sun.

The examination carried out had shown that this star was in the process of revolving around a black center that was ten times larger than the sized of the Sun.

“This is the first time we’ve identified a Sun-like star at a large distance from the center in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our Galaxy,” said Kareem El-Badry from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian who led the study.

The two objects are Gaia BH1 and the star in the center of the pair, which is located at the distance of the solar parallax, and it causes astronomers’ concern about how the star remained intact in the hypergiant phase that must have preceded its companion’s collapse into a black hole.

Oddly, this system is not easily described by standard notions of binary star evolution: It was puzzling for El-Badry how this binary system was born. To give a grasp the largest known black hole currently in the Universe is in the galaxy Abell 1201, and it 33 billion times the mass of the Sun.

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