Closest black hole to Earth (so far)

[stevebowers]

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/6/212491...rbit-close

Astronomers have discovered what they think is a new black hole, and if they’re right, it’s not that far away from Earth. At a mere 1,000 light-years away, the small black hole would be our cosmic neighbor — the closest one to our planet ever found.

Being a black hole, the object is impossible to see directly with instruments from Earth, as no light escapes it. So scientists working at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile actually inferred that that object is where they think based on the movements of stars nearby, according to a new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The team was trying to get to the bottom of the weird behavior of these two stars that were close to one another in space in a system called HR 6819. They are both in the same system and similar in mass and size, but they act very differently. “One of them is rotating very rapidly, so much that it’s almost flying apart,” Thomas Rivinius, an ESO scientist who led the study, tells The Verge. The other one is barely rotating much at all. Meanwhile, they are both moving through space at different velocities. The rapid rotator is moving very slowly compared to the slow rotator, which moving through space at an extreme speed.

This star is in Celestia, although under a different name. It is shown as HD 167128, 760 ly away in Telescopium. The distance is a bit uncertain because of proper motion.

It's bright enough to be seen by the naked eye; this star, or rather triplet of stars, was probably born in a stellar nursery somewhere, relatively recently. The star is probably in the Communion Of Worlds volume in OA.