- A new study has discovered a black hole roughly 1500 light years from Earth, the closest such object on record.
- “This is the nearest known black hole by a factor of three, and its discovery suggests the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in binaries,” Dr. Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Center for Astronomy and the primary author of the paper outlining the discovery, said in a press release.
- Gaia BH1 is considered ‘dormant’ because it is not consuming anything at the moment — its stellar companion seems to be in a stable orbit outside the event horizon.
