Astronomers have detected the largest stellar black hole “Gaia BH3” with mass 33 times that of the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy.
- Gaia BH3 is also the second closest black hole to Earth, sitting just 2,000 light years away from the planet.
- It is located just 1,924 light-years from the Solar System, in the constellation of Aquila.
- When a star with more than eight times the Sun’s mass runs out of fuel, it explodes as a supernova and its core collapses to form a stellar black hole.
- The new discovered stellar black hole “Gaia BH3” has dethroned Cygnus X-1, which is 21 times as massive as the Sun, to become the most massive black hole of stellar origin in the Milky Way.
- Scientists spotted BH3 in the latest trove of data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The space telescope launched in 2013 with the aim of compiling a 3D map of a billion stars.
Types of Black hole
- Astronomers generally divide black holes into three categories according to their mass: stellar-mass, supermassive, and intermediate-mass.
- When a star with more than eight times the Sun’s mass runs out of fuel, its core collapses, rebounds, and explodes as a supernova.
- Supermassive black holes have hundreds of thousands to billions of times the Sun’s mass, although some scientists place the lower boundary at tens of thousands.
- Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which has a mass 4.2 million times that of the sun. Supermassive black holes like Sgr A* aren’t created by the deaths of massive stars but rather by mergers of progressively larger and larger black holes.
- Almost every large galaxy, including our Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at its center.
