A team of astronomers says new research suggests Earth’s closest black hole turns out to be a “vampire” star. The space object was found in 2020 in a star system just 1,000 light-years away. The original report was led by the European Southern Observatory astronomers and said they identified the closest black hole to Earth, in the HR 6819-star system.
The results from the study were later contested by other researchers, including a team from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, a university in Belgium. The two teams published a new paper on Wednesday in the journal of Astronomy & Astrophysics. The study suggests that there is actually no black hole in that star system.
An ESO astronomer and lead author on the original paper thought that HR 6819 was a triple system. This meant one star would orbit a black hole every 40 days and the second star in a much wider orbit. According to NASA, black holes are very difficult to find as “its very nature, a black hole cannot be seen.”
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