Record-breaking black hole in the Milky Way – Science and technology

(ANSA) – ROME – An unprecedented black hole is lurking in the Milky Way just 2,000 light-years away, still going undetected.
It is the most massive black hole in our galaxy, resulting from the collapse of a star, with a mass 33 times that of the Sun, and was identified thanks to data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.
The discovery, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, was carried out by the French national center for scientific research Cnrs, as well as with the collaboration of the National Institute of Astrophysics, the Italian Space Agency and the universities of Catania, Turin and Padua. and the International School of Advanced Studies of Trieste.
Black holes of this type, previously discovered in the Milky Way, have on average about 10 times the mass of the Sun, and even the second largest known, Cygnus X-1, reaches only 21 solar masses, making this new discovery exceptional.
“No one expected to find a black hole of this mass lurking nearby, which had not yet been discovered,” says Italian Pasquale Panuzzo of the CNRS, who led the study.
“As a researcher, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery,” he says.
This observation was later confirmed by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, which also revealed several key features of the black hole’s companion star, called Gaia BH3.
In fact, paired stars tend to have similar compositions, and so the composition of one also provides important information about the other. The data shows that its companion is very poor in heavy metals, supporting the theory that these very massive black holes form from metal-poor stars that lose less mass during their lives and therefore retain more material when they die. (ANSA).