Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, indicating that it is about 1,600 light years away from our planet.<\/p>\n
Scientists reported that this hole is 10 times larger than the sun, and that it is three times closer than the hole that held the previous record in terms of proximity, reports Al-Rai daily quoting Sky News Arabia.<\/p>\n
The hole was discovered by observing the movement of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at approximately the same distance as the Earth orbits the sun.<\/p>\n
Karim El-Badri, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US state of Massachusetts, said that the black hole was initially discovered using the European Space Agency’s “Gaia” spacecraft.<\/p>\n
Al-Badri and his team worked with the Gemini International Observatory in Hawaii to confirm their findings, which were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, indicating that it is about 1,600 light years away from our planet. Scientists reported that this hole is 10 times larger than the sun, and that it is three times closer than the hole that held the previous record in terms of proximity, reports Al-Rai […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":110024,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-world-news"],"yoast_head":"\n