Scientists have recently found a black hole with a mass 33 times that of our Sun, and it's surprisingly close to Earth—relatively speaking, of course! This massive black hole, located in a nearby galaxy about 1,500 light-years away, is the closest one we’ve ever discovered. What's really cool is that it’s a “dormant” black hole, which means it's not actively pulling in matter or creating those giant, glowing energy jets we sometimes see in space. Researchers used a powerful telescope to detect it by watching how its gravity affected a nearby star. Discovering black holes like this helps scientists understand more about how stars live and die. It’s a bit spooky, but luckily, even though it’s close by cosmic standards, it’s far enough away that we’re completely safe! Credit: Stephen Hawking in Stockholm: By Alexandar Vujadinovic, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44259942 Animation is created by Bright Side. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/ Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightside Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en Stock materials (photos, footages and other): https://www.depositphotos.com https://www.shutterstock.com https://www.eastnews.ru ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.
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00:00Astronomers have discovered the most massive stellar black hole ever spotted in our home Milky Way galaxy.
00:07This newly found space monster is 33 times bigger than the Sun and sits 2,000 light years away from us.
00:14Until recently, the largest stellar black hole found residing in our galaxy has been around 20 times as big as our star in terms of mass.
00:23As for the average stellar mass black hole, it's usually about 10 times as hefty as the Sun.
00:29Scientists from the European Southern Observatory's Gaia mission spotted the giant black hole after a star started to wobble while orbiting in that area.
00:39The black hole got the name of Gaia BH3.
00:42The proximity of this space object to Earth makes it the second closest black hole to our planet ever discovered.
00:49The nearest one is called Gaia BH1.
00:53It's hanging out around 1,560 light years away from us.
00:58This uncomfortably close neighbor has a mass of about 9.6 times that of the Sun.
01:04It means that it's way smaller than the newly found black hole.
01:08Gaia BH3 is located in the Aguila constellation.
01:12From Earth, it seems to have the shape of an eagle.
01:16Interestingly, astronomers didn't expect to find a high-mass black hole lurking so relatively close to Earth and remaining undetected for so long.
01:26Okay, we can probably admit that this stellar black hole is just a small fry compared to supermassive black holes like the one that dominates the center of the Milky Way.
01:36I'm talking about Sagittarius A star.
01:39This space giant has a mass of 4.2 million times that of the Sun.
01:45While a stellar black hole forms when a star collapses, supermassive black giants have their own ways of seeing the light of day.
01:53They are usually the result of mergers of progressively larger and larger black holes.
01:58We'll talk about that later.
02:00First, let's speak a bit more about how stellar black holes form.
02:05When stars near the end of their lives, they typically inflate, lose a lot of mass, and cool to form what we know as white dwarfs.
02:14Such massive stellar black holes as Gaia BH3 are believed to form when a star doesn't contain heavy elements and loses not so much mass over its lifetime.
02:25Such stars are called metal-poor.
02:28Afterward, instead of cooling into a white dwarf, this star collapses into a black hole.
02:35The companion of Gaia BH3 is a very metal-poor star.
02:39It suggests that the star that collapsed and formed BH3 was metal-poor, too.
02:45Astronomers know of about 50 stellar black holes in the Milky Way.
02:51Some black holes are larger than others.
02:54You see, the universe is filled with black holes.
02:57Some of them are sprinkled randomly throughout galaxies.
03:01Others, those giants we know as supermassive black holes, sit at the center of galaxies.
03:07While stellar black holes are usually just a few times bigger than the Sun, such space monsters can weigh from a million to a billion solar masses.
03:17But even though they're so much heavier than our star, they're packed into a relatively small area.
03:23On a cosmic scale, of course.
03:25The size of our solar system or so.
03:28Some astronomers think supermassive black holes could form by several stars colliding and collapsing at once.
03:35While other experts state that such space objects might have started growing several billion years ago.
03:41At first, a small seed appears somewhere out there in space, which then gradually increases in mass to form a black hole.
03:50This seed does it through the process of accretion, which basically means gathering more and more matter around itself.
03:58Besides the absence of any precise information about the formation of black holes, there's also the black hole information paradox.
04:07If a black hole has some mass, and as we know, these space objects have a lot of it.
04:13Then, according to the first law of thermodynamics, it should have a temperature.
04:18And according to the second law of thermodynamics, it should also radiate heat.
04:23Stephen Hawking showed that black holes are supposed to emit radiation too.
04:27These days, this kind of radiation is called Hawking radiation.
04:32It should form at the boundary of a black hole, but after proving it, Hawking pointed out a paradox.
04:37If a black hole is capable of evaporating, some of the information it contains can be lost forever.
04:44The problem is that the information contained in thermal radiation emitted by a black hole gets degraded.
04:51It doesn't repeat any information about the matter swallowed by a black hole before.
04:56Such an irreversible loss of information contradicts one of the basic principles of quantum mechanics.
05:03Physical systems that change over time cannot create or destroy information.
05:09It means we must be missing something.
05:11Both physicists and mathematicians have tried to come up with different ideas, but they ended with pretty weird results.
05:18Some have even claimed that the universe could be holographic.
05:22It means that the universe that we know and love is actually the result of some mysterious interactions at the infinitely distant boundary.
05:31I told you, black holes are really strange.
05:34At the same time, we have definitely found space objects that seem to have the properties of black holes.
05:41For example, look at this image of black hole M87 star.
05:46It certainly looks like a physical object, but what if black holes don't exist at all?
05:53There's an idea that black holes are actually gravastars, a blend of gravity, vacuum, and stars.
06:00This theory was first proposed in 2001 by Emil Matola and Pavel O. Mazur.
06:07They hypothesized that at one point during the collapse of a large star, intense gravity might transform its matter into a new state.
06:16It's similar to what occurs when atoms are cooled to such low energy states that they start acting like a single super atom.
06:24When we speak of gravastars, a star might collapse to the point of the event horizon, or the point of no return, and then its matter is transformed into a new state.
06:34It exerts enough outward pressure to prevent the star from collapsing into a physics-defying singularity.
06:41In gravastars, an ultra-thin, ultra-cold, and ultra-dark indestructible shell surrounds heavily wrapped spacetime.
06:50This new form of matter turns out to be very durable, but it's also a bit flexible, like a bubble.
06:56So anything that's trapped by the intense gravity of a gravastar and smashed into it gets obliterated and then assimilated into the shell of this bizarre space structure.
07:07One of the benefits of the gravastar theory is getting away with those messy paradoxes connected with information and singularities.
07:15But even though this idea sounds kinda cool, it doesn't explain the phenomena we observe.
07:20And we've definitely observed something that looks like black holes.
07:25On the other hand, look at this shadow. It isn't caused by the trapping of light in the event horizon.
07:31It's a slightly different phenomenon known as the gravitational redshift.
07:35It makes light lose energy when it moves through a region with a powerful gravitational field.
07:41So, potentially, it could be a gravastar.
07:45When the light emitted from the regions close to the alternative objects reaches our telescopes,
07:50most of its energy is already lost to the gravitational field, which causes the appearance of this shadow.
07:57And still, like with black holes, things get complicated when you add rotation to the equation.
08:04Many experts are sure that gravastars would not be able to remain stable during rotation.
08:09But wait, it gets even more bizarre.
08:12There are suggestions that the insides of gravastars could contain a series of thicker shells.
08:18Those are known as nestars, something like a Matryoshka doll.
08:23Of course, these theories aren't perfect yet.
08:26Astronomers still have a lot of work trying to build functioning models.
08:30There's also a chance that both black holes and gravastars exist.
08:34But then we've got another problem on our hands.
08:37How can we distinguish between the two?
08:40Some theories suggest that these different kinds of space objects should also emit very different gravitational radiation.
08:47It could allow us to figure out whether we're looking at a gravastar or a traditional black hole.
08:53That's it for today.
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