El-Badry and his team prodded further and turned to the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph instrument on Gemini North, which "measured the velocity of the companion star as it orbited the black hole and provided a precise measurement of its orbital period", according to the release.Ī wobble was noticed in the star's position. The European Space Agency's Gaia had captured irregularities in the star's motion, which seemed to be caused by the gravity of an undiscovered massive object. The article has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is the first unambiguous detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our Galaxy." "While there have been many claimed detections of systems like this, almost all these discoveries have subsequently been refuted. "Take the Solar System, put a black hole where the Sun is, and the Sun where the Earth is, and you get this system," explained Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and the lead author of the paper, in a statement. A companion Sun-like star that orbits the black hole at about the same distance as the Earth orbits the Sun, helped discover Gaia BH1. All credit goes to the astronomers utilizing the Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i, one of the twin telescopes of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab.
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