'Most massive' stellar black hole in the Milky Way discovered lurking close to Earth

Only 2,000 light years from Earth, astronomers have discovered a massive black hole which formed in the aftermath of an exploding star – the biggest found in our galaxy so far.

BH3, the most massive stellar black hole found in the Milky Way, was discovered by researchers because of the powerful tug it holds on a different star that orbits the object in the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle. This exciting scientific discovery is so important that scientists released details of the object earlier than planned because they wanted to let other astronomers have the chance to see the black hole as soon as possible.

“It’s a complete surprise,” Dr Pasquale Panuzzo, an astronomer and member of the Gaia collaboration at the Observatoire de Paris said. “It is the most massive stellar origin black hole in our galaxy and the second nearest discovered so far.”

Black hole

Stellar black holes of this kind form when massive stars implode and die at the end of their life. Many have been found in our galaxy, the Milky Way, with most weighing in at around 10 times the mass of the Sun. Another massive black hole in the Milky Way, Sagittarius A, has the combined mass of several million suns, lurking at the heart of the galaxy. It is slightly different however as it was formed not from an exploding star but by the collapse of gigantic clouds of dust and gas.

Researchers spotted this most recent discovery, BH3, in the latest trove of data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which launched a telescope in 2013 with the aim of compiling a 3D map of a billion stars. As researchers were reviewing the Gaia observations, they noticed a distinct, and strange wobble in one of the stars in Aquila, a constellation that you can see in the summer sky in the northern hemisphere. This movement suggested the star was being pulled around by a black hole, but not just any, one that is 33 times more massive than the Sun.

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Black holes

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert confirmed BH3’s mass and the star’s orbit, which circles the black hole once every 11.6 years. “Only the central black hole in the Milky Way is more massive than this one,” Panuzzo said.

Scientists who measured BH3’s companion star could not find any sign that it was contaminated with material blasted out from the stellar explosion that formed the black hole. These findings suggest the black hole formed long before it trapped the companion star being dragged along in its powerful gravitational field.