Gaia BH3 Black Hole | 07 Feb 2025

Source: TH 

Astronomers have discovered Gaia BH3, the largest known stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way, located in the constellation Aquila.  

  • This marks the 3rd black hole found using the Gaia telescope of the European Space Agency. (Previous discoveries: Gaia BH1 in 2022 and Gaia BH2 in 2023) 
  • Gaia BH3 has a mass 33 times that of the Sun, making it the most massive stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way. 
    • A stellar-mass black hole is a type of black hole that forms when massive stars, weighing 5 to 10 times the Sun, collapse. 
  • Gaia BH3 is not actively pulling in matter and does not emit  X-rays showing evidence of "silent" black holes without X-ray emissions. 
    • Rings of gas and dust around black holes emit light, including X-rays, making them detectable. 
  • The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for confirming black hole formation as a key prediction of general theory of relativity and discovering a supermassive compact object at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. 

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