Browsing: Gaia

The Gaia probe from the European Space Agency, according to Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, has discovered the closest ever known black hole to Earth, and it is barely 1,600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. The discovery was made by observing the motion of its companion star, which travels around the black hole at a distance similar to that of Earth’s orbit around the sun.