ABC: Closest black hole to Earth discovered 1,000 light-years away

Tek

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The black hole -- which NASA defines as a great amount of matter packed into a very small area with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape -- was discovered in a star system called HR 6819 and is about four times the mass of the sun, according to the findings published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"We were totally surprised when we realized that this is the first stellar system with a black hole that can be seen with the unaided eye," Petr Hadrava, co-author of the study and emeritus scientist at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, said in a statement.

Scientists stumbled upon the out-of-this-world discovery in the Telescopium constellation while tracking two stars orbiting each other just outside the gravitational pull of the black hole, with the help of a super telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile.

 
I'm into astronomy & had read about this before. It wouldn't surprise me if they found more black holes in close proximity to us. The Telescopium constellation is in the Southern Hemisphere so is not visible for those of us in the Northern half. I'd love to be able to go to a Planetarium to see if this black hole is visible to us. If not, at least NASA is good about producing images & posting them on their website.
 

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