Astronomers have discovered the largest stellar black hole ever detected. A black hole with a mass 33 times larger than the Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy ‘Gaia-BH3’ was named.
About 2,000 light-years away from Earth, Gaia-BH3 is the second closest black hole to our planet yet discovered. The discovery was made by George Seabroke and his team from University College London using the Gaia telescope.
According to New Scientist, the discovery of the black hole is not a surprise. Seabroke said about the discovery: “The discovery of such a massive black hole was not a complete surprise; experiments that discovered gravitational waves, ripples in space-time caused by the motions of heavy objects, had found traces of these waves in other galaxies.”
Black holes are discovered by detecting the glow of hot material orbiting and falling into them because light cannot escape them. But Gaia-BH3 is dormant for now and does not ingest any material. Astronomers in England therefore discovered the black hole by noticing the strange movement of a star that appeared to revolve around empty space.
