Over the years, astronomers have found a couple dozen black holes in our Milky Way galaxy.

And it proves Einstein's theory was right CalçadaĪstronomers saw a star dancing around a black hole. This artist's impression illustrates the precession of the star's orbit, with the effect exaggerated for easier visualisation. This effect, known as Schwarzschild precession, had never before been measured for a star around a supermassive black hole. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity. Observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. “An invisible object with a mass at least 4 times that of the Sun can only be a black hole,” said Thomas Rivinius, lead study author and European Southern Observatory scientist, in a statement. But studying the star orbiting it signified the presence of the black hole. That makes it one of the first stellar-mass black holes found that doesn’t interact violently with its environment. “We were totally surprised when we realised that this is the first stellar system with a black hole that can be seen with the unaided eye,” said Petr Hadrava, study co-author and Emeritus Scientist at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, in a statement.īecause this black hole doesn’t have violent interactions with its surroundings, it’s truly invisible. This star survived a close call with a black hole.

Weiss ) NASA/CXO/CSIC-INTA/G.Miniutti et al./CXC/M. (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/CSIC-INTA/G.Miniutti et al. At closest approach, the black hole pulls matter from the white dwarf onto a surrounding disk. The white dwarf then enters an elliptical, 9-hour-long orbit around the black hole, as depicted in this artist's illustration. Once captured, the red giant's outer layers were stripped off, leaving the core of the star - known as a white dwarf - behind. As a red giant star approached a supermassive black hole in the galaxy GSN 069, it was caught in the black hole's gravity.

The observation was made using the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.Ī study published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics describes the triple system.ĭata from Chandra and XMM-Newton indicate that a star survived a close call with a black hole. This revealed that what they were actually seeing was a triple system that included a black hole, not just a double star system. The second star is further out from the first star and the black hole. When astronomers observed the star system, in the Telescopium constellation, they noticed that one of the stars was completing an orbit around a hidden object every 40 Earth days. ( A black hole is a place in space that even light can’t get out because gravity pulls so much.) The two stars can be seen with the naked eye on dark, clear nights in the southern hemisphere. A black hole has been discovered 1,000 light-years from Earth, making it the closest black hole to our solar system ever found.Īlthough the black hole itself is invisible, it has two bright companion stars that gave away the hiding spot of the black hole.

Earth has been sucked into a black hole