This black hole was found without seeing it — a perfectly ordinary star nearby was swinging round something invisible! It is the closest one we know about, and it is quietly doing nothing at all.
Quiet stellar-mass black hole (~10 solar masses) orbited by a Sun-like star; found purely from its gravity.
Stellar black hole: What is left when the most massive stars collapse. Every kind of thing there is →
No. No telescope on Earth will show you this one; it is here to be understood, not seen. It is here because it is worth knowing about — and because leaving it out would make the sky look emptier than it is.
In weight, about 10 times the Sun's mass. On the 100-meter-track scale model of the Milky Way, Gaia BH1 would be about 1.6 meters from the Sun — roughly as tall as an adult. Light takes 2 thousand years to get here from Gaia BH1, so what you are looking at is Gaia BH1 as it was 2 thousand years ago.
| Distance from us | ~1,560 light-years |
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Not this one. But the sky over your head is full of ones you can see, and the Planetarium knows which.