Milky Way's 'Sleeping Giant' Black Hole Lurks Shockingly Close to Earth (2024)

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Milky Way's 'Sleeping Giant' Black Hole Lurks Shockingly Close to Earth? ›

The newfound black hole, an intense, light-trapping abyss which has been named Gaia BH3, lurks just 1,926 light-years from Earth in the Aquila constellation. (That makes it the second closest black hole to Earth after Gaia BH1, which resides at 1,500 light-years away and is three times lighter than Gaia BH3.)

One such black hole called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is located at the heart of the Milky Way. It possesses 4 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth. Gaia BH3's progenitor star was composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.

The closest black hole to Earth is Gaia-BH1 (also discovered by Gaia), which is 1,560 light-years away. Gaia-BH1 has a mass around 9.6 times that of the sun, making it considerably smaller than this newly discovered black hole.

The black hole, named Gaia BH3, was discovered "by chance" from data collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, an astronomer from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Observatoire de Paris, Pasquale Panuzzo, told AFP.

The new discovery is a landmark, representing the first time that a big black hole with such an origin has been found close to Earth. The stellar-mass black hole, designated Gaia-BH3, is 33 times more massive than our sun.

Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.

At the center of our galaxy lurks a dark, beating heart: Sagittarius A*, a black hole some four million times more massive than our sun. We cannot see this fearsome object directly—only its shadow, a lightless bubble nestled within an “accretion disk” of infalling incandescent plasma.

When matter falls into or comes closer than the event horizon of a black hole, it becomes isolated from the rest of space-time. It can never leave that region. For all practical purposes the matter has disappeared from the universe.

Ripped apart: The Earth would stand no chance if it encountered a rogue black hole; the cosmic black hole's tidal forces would easily rip the planet apart. Lost in space: Matter piles up in a superheated, rapidly spinning disc before plunging through the horizon of a black hole, never to reappear again.

On the contrary it will take over 4 billion years to reach Earth, so we are safe for now NOT 200 years. A black hole with millions of times more mass than the sun is hurtling towards Earth and will one day wipe out life as we know it.

Can the biggest black hole eat the Milky Way? ›

No. There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.

The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure.

Putting these pieces together, it's entirely reasonable that one of the Milky Way's mergers over the past ~11 billion years resulted in the ejection of its initial central, supermassive black hole. What remains, today, may be merely the result of what it's been able to regrow in the time that's passed since.

The nearest known black hole is Gaia BH1, which was discovered in September 2022 by a team led by Kareem El-Badry. Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large ball that could hold a few million Earths.

No one has ever created a black hole on our planet before. But even if someone did, it likely wouldn't pose a huge threat. Real-world black holes are only scary in the sense that if you get too close to one, you won't be able to escape.

That being said, we shouldn't be too worried about Gaia BH1, since 1,500 light years is still very far away, and there's not much chance of us falling in anytime soon. Anyway, it's apparently “dormant” (in fact, El-Badry is dedicated to finding and researching “dormant” black holes).

Black holes may be notorious for sucking up anything that gets in their way, but we have nothing to worry about from the one in our galaxy's heart. At least not for another four billion years.

In short, no. There's no way that a black hole could eat the universe, or even an entire galaxy, according to NASA. Here's why. Black holes are former massive stars that have collapsed back in on themselves to become incomprehensibly dense — so much so that even light can't escape them.

In the case of Ton 618, the enormous Lyman-alpha nebula surrounding it has the diameter of at least 100 kiloparsecs (320,000 light-years), twice the size of the Milky Way.