Which is the nearest black hole to earth and how does it look like?

Astronomers have said that they discovered a black hole closest to our Earth. The black hole resides almost 1,500 light-years away from the planet in a constellation named Monoceros in our Milky Way.

The tiny black hole is called the Unicorn according to a team of researchers at Ohio State University. Astronomer and a graduate student Tharindu Jayasinghe said, “When we looked at the data, this black hole-the Unicorn- just popped out.” Mr. Jayasinghe and his supervisor were looking for a potentially tiny black hole in the constellation Monoceros. They found a red giant on Monoceros that was in its last stages of life. The researcher duo analyzed the data with various telescope and satellite systems in order to investigate. They said the red giant’s velocity and the way it was being pulled by gravity only suggest a possibility of a black hole orbiting it.

According to astronomers when a star collapses down it can have two possibilities either it can turn into a neutron star or can form a black hole. In order to become a neutron star, the collapsing star has to be 2.3 times lesser than solar mass. The collapsing star has to exceed at least 5 solar masses to form a black hole. But no black holes are discovered to form in between these masses. This asserts a possibility of having a mass gap. The Unicorn is a tiny black hole that has almost 3 solar masses. However, from the shape of the red giant in the Monoceros, it can be calculated that it was being devoured by a black hole.

According to astronomer Todd Thompson, “Just as the Moon’s gravity distorts the Earth’s oceans, causing the seas to bulge toward and away from the Moon, producing high tides, so does the black hole distort the star into a football-like shape with one axis longer than the other.”

The discovery of the Unicorn can help researchers solve the mystery of the mass gap. Thompson says, “I think the field is pushing towards this, to really map out how many low-mass, how many intermediate-mass, and how many high-mass black holes there are. Because every time you find one it gives you a clue about which star collapse, which explode and which are in between.”

The Unicorn is the closest known and tiny black hole to the Earth and it gives a push to the astronomers and astrophysicists to solve the mysterious case of the mass gap.




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