This is Gaia BH3, the most massive stellar black hole in the Milky Way.

A group of astronomers discovered most massive stellar black hole still in the Milky Way with mass 33 times more than the Sun, reported on Tuesday European Southern Observatory (ESO).

He black hole was discovered in data from the Gaia mission, a space observatory operated by European Space Agency (ESA) which surveys the sky from Earth’s orbit to create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the Milky Way.

Data ESO Extremely Large Telescope and other ground-based observatories were used to test the mass of the black hole, which turned out to be 33 times the mass of the Sun.

The discovery was made possible because the black hole causes a strange “oscillating” motion of the companion star orbiting it.

Stellar black holes are formed as a result of the collapse of massive stars and those that have been identified so far in Milky Way They are on average about 10 times more massive than the Sun.

Even the next most massive stellar black hole, known in our galaxy, Cygnus X-1 reaches a mass of just 21 solar masses, making this new observation exceptional.

ESO also highlighted that, surprisingly, this black hole is also very close to Earth, just 2,000 light years away in the constellation Aquila, and is the second closest known black hole.

By nickname Gaia BH3 or BH3 In short, this was discovered when the team analyzed observations of Gaia in preparation for a new data release.

“No one expected to find a large mass black hole lurking nearby that had not yet been discovered,” said Pasquale Panuzzo, a member of the Gaia collaboration and an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, part of the French National Center for Scientific Research. (CNRS).

“You make such a discovery once in your research career,” he emphasized.

The astronomical community had previously discovered black holes are equally massive outside our galaxy, and suggested that they could form as a result of the collapse of stars whose chemical composition contains very few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

It is believed that these stars with low metal content They lose less mass during their lives and therefore have more material left over to form high-mass black holes after they die.

But until now there has been no evidence directly linking metal-poor stars to high-mass black holes.

Pairs of stars tend to have similar compositions, meaning that the star’s partner BN3 contains important information about the star that collapsed and created this exceptional black hole, ESO explains.

This companion was a very metal-poor star, indicating that the star that collapsed to form BH3 was also metal-poor, as predicted.