Astronomers have stumbled upon an enormous black hole in the Milky Way that is 33 times the size of the sun and just 2,000 light years from Earth, the Guardian reports.
BH3, as it’s named, is both the biggest stellar black hole ever located in our galaxy and the second nearest to the earth. It was spotted in recent data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.
Dr Pasquale Panuzzo, an astronomer and member of the Gaia collaboration at the Observatoire de Paris, said BH3’s discovery came as “a complete surprise.”
[See more: Macao secondary school students honoured for asteroid discovery]
His team identified it after noticing that a star in the Aquila constellation had developed a distinct wobble, implying it was being affected by a black hole with an enormous mass.
Stellar black holes are regions with immense gravitational pull that form when certain stars reach the end of their lives and explode. Most of the Milky Way’s black holes have a mass around 10 times that of the sun.
There is a far larger black hole than BH3 in the Milky Way named Sagittarius A, but it’s not a stellar black hole. Rather, Sagittarius A formed after the collapse of vast clouds of dust and gas.
