Gaia BH1 is just 1,560 light-years from our planet.
harbors about 100 million stellar-mass black holes, light-gobbling objects that are five to 100 times more massive than the sun.
Not all stellar-mass black holes that inhabit binary systems are actively feeding, however. Finding these dormant objects is even more difficult and requires different strategies. One of those stars is the companion to Gaia BH1. Its motion displays tiny irregularities — an indication that something massive and unseen is tugging on it gravitationally.
These follow-up observations, combined with the Gaia data, allowed the team to take the system's measure in detail. The unseen object contains the mass of 10 suns, they determined, and orbits the system's center of mass about once every 186 Earth days. And it must be a black hole.
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