Black holes may lurk much closer to Earth than we thought: Astronomer claims ‘two or three’ voids could be hiding just 150 light-years away
- Scientists had thought the closest black hole to Earth was 1,565 light-years away
- But a team of researchers used modelling to suggest it might be 10 times closer
SAM TONKIN FROM DAILY MAIL
Unless they are giving off light by gobbling up nearby stars, it is impossible to know where black holes may lurk.
It’s for this reason that we know of only 20 such behemoths in our Milky Way galaxy — the closest of which was believed to be around 1,565 light-years away.
Not anymore, however.
That’s because a team of astronomers think there may actually be two or three black holes hiding more than 10 times closer at just 150 light-years away.
Astrophysicist Stefano Torniamenti, of the University of Padua in Italy, led a study which analysed the Hyades cluster, hundreds of stars visible to the naked eye that lie at the heart of the constellation Taurus.
Known as an open cluster, the group of stars share the same age, place of origin, chemical characteristics, and motion through space.
The reason the researchers picked Hyades, thought to be around 625 million years old, is because it is in the densely-packed environments of open clusters that more collisions and mergers occur — and in turn, why black holes are predicted to be there, too.
The trouble is, they don’t give off any light unless they’re actively devouring stellar material, so can be hard to find.
Torniamenti and his team therefore decided to take an indirect approach.
They modelled the mass and stellar motions of Hyades with the help of data from the Gaia space observatory, which is currently mapping the three-dimensional positions…
