By LENA
Published
10 hours ago,
Update 10 hours ago
REUTERS/European Southern Observatory
SEEN FROM ELSEWHERE – Gaia BH3 is the largest celestial object of its type known to date in the Milky Way. Its large mass is an enigma for specialists in the evolution of massive stars.
By Piotr Cieśliński (La Gazeta Wyborcza)
It is exceptionally close to Earth and constitutes an enigma. Let us specify that it is a stellar black hole, which means that it was born from the collapse of a star. The absolute record in terms of mass is still held by the central black hole of the Milky Way, but this has another origin: it was most certainly born at the same time as our galaxy. The mass of this stellar black hole, the most massive of its kind in the Milky Way, is 33 times that of the Sun.
It is located in the constellation Aquila, at a distance of just 2,000 light years (the Galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across). It was spotted using data from the Gaia catalog collected by the European Space Agency. His discovery, in which scientists from the Warsaw University Astronomical Observatory took part, was described by the magazine Astronomy & Astrophysics. Given that this is the third…
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