Astronomers Find Near-Earth Black Holes That Can Be Seen With Telescopes

(Foto: European Southern Observatory (ESO))

JAKARTA - European astronomers have revealed that they have detected the closest black hole to Earth that has ever been found. This black hole, it is claimed, can be seen with the naked eye or more clearly using a telescope.

Compiled from USA Today, Sunday May 10, researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered a black hole using the 2.2 meter MPG / ESO telescope tool at the La Silla Observatory in Chile with two main sequence B type stars, visible from Earth with the eye naked, and was previously thought of as a binary system called HR 6819.

This nearby black hole, previously undetected due to its very small size and silence. The new research appears in the publication Astronomy and Astrophysics. The extraterrestrial object is believed to be at least 4.2 times the mass of the sun. Located about 1,000 light years from Earth, or about 9.5 trillion kilometers away.

Research leader for ESO, Thomas Rivinius admits that the black hole is still very far from Earth. However, Rivinius noted that the celestial body had to be examined properly whether it was dangerous or not.

Such celestial objects will continue to appear in the future, the next closest to Earth may be about three times farther away, or about 3,200 light years.

For information, black holes are very dense objects with a gravitational pull so strong that even light cannot escape. Some are very large, such as those at the center of galaxies 26,000 light years from Earth. The black hole is four million times the mass of the sun.

According to the researchers, the newly discovered black hole is gravitationally bound to two stars known as the triple system and is perched in the constellation Telescopium in the Southern Hemisphere's sky.

"There must be hundreds of millions of black holes out there, but we know very little. Knowing what to look for should put us in a better position to find them," said Rivinius.

In fact, the Milky Way contains between 100 million and 1 billion small, compact objects there. Astronomers claim, usually the object is invisible and can only be found when they are looking for food in the partner star or something that falls into it.

"These are young stars and hot compared to the sun which is 4.6 billion years old. They may be 140 million years old, but at 15,000 degrees Celsius, they are three times hotter than the sun," added Rivinius.

About 15 million years ago, one of those stars turned too big and too hot to instantly become a supernova, then turn into a black hole in the process of freezing.

Although the two stars are quite far from the black hole, in the next few million years, closer stars are expected to grow as part of the cycle.