The closest black hole to Earth is no more -- in fact, it never existed
By Brandon Specktor published about 8 hours ago
Astronomers fell for a cosmic optical illusion — but the truth may be just as cool.
An Artist’s impression of HR 6819, with a 'vampire' star. (Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada)
In 2020, astronomers identified a nearby star system that appeared to contain something phenomenal: the closest black hole to Earth, sitting a mere 1,000 light-years away (that's less than 1% of the width of the Milky Way). Now, new research from some of those same astronomers suggests that they may have been deceived by a cosmic illusion.
In a new study published March 2 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers took another look at that star system — named HR 6819 — with the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope. What appeared in 2020 to be a system of three massive objects — a large star orbiting a black hole every 40 days, with a second star orbiting much farther away — actually contains no black hole at all, the researchers wrote.
Instead, HR 6819 now appears to be a system of just two stars orbiting each other very closely, and with a very fraught relationship.
"Our best interpretation so far is that we caught this binary system in a moment shortly after one of the stars had sucked the atmosphere off its companion star," study co-author Julia Bodensteiner, an ESO Fellow in Munich, Germany, said in a statement. "This is a common phenomenon in close binary systems, sometimes referred to as stellar vampirism."
More:
https://www.livescience.com/closest-black-hole-earth-vampire-star
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