The roughly four-billion-year-old system consists of a black hole and two orbiting stars—a configuration that's never been seen before.
Physicists from MIT and Caltech have discovered a first: a black hole triple system, consisting of three bodies spinning around each other about 7,800 light-years from Earth.
The system in question is V404 Cygni, which contains a black hole of the same name about nine times the mass of the Sun. First confirmed to be a black hole in 1992, V404 Cygni has been extensively studied; in 2022, NASABlack holes are regions of space with gravity so intense that light cannot escape them, rendering them pitch black. They’re generally thought to form in supernovae, the brilliant deaths of stars, whose remnants collapse into black holes.
By the team’s measure, the inner star orbits the black hole in a little less than a week. In contrast, the outer star orbits the body every 70,000 years. That’s a lot of weeks—3.64 million, to be exact. The outer star is about 3,500 astronomical units from the black hole, with an astronomical unit being the measure of the average distance between the Earth and Sun. According to an MIT release, that distance is also equivalent to 100 times the distance between Pluto and the Sun.
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