Monstrous Black Hole Too Close to Earth

Black holes are one of the most intriguing phenomena in our universe. These dark matter-devouring balls of gravity are so far away that we don't usually need to worry about them. But there's one black hole that's different: Gaia bh1. This enormous black hole sits just outside our solar system, a mere 1600 light years away. That may seem like a vast distance, but it's way closer than any other black hole on record. What's more, we didn't even know about it until recently.

Despite being 10 times more massive than our sun, Gaia bh1 is dormant and hides in the darkness, patiently waiting for the galaxy to throw some cosmic matter its way to feast on. However, Gaia bh1 couldn't help but jiggle its star counterpart a little, which eventually gave away its presence. Most star systems in the universe are binary, meaning they have not one but two stars orbiting each other. Our black hole neighbor is also part of a binary star system, except that it has one star and one black hole. Gaia bh1 was disguised as a star, but we still caught it.

While Gaia bh1 may not be the scariest black hole out there, it's still fascinating to learn about. Some black holes are so bizarre that they shouldn't even exist. For example, a team of scientists discovered an unbelievable black hole and gave it the melodic name lb1. The weird thing about this black hole is that it's just too massive to be true. There are two types of black holes that we know of. Stellar black holes are what massive stars become when they die, and they can be between 10 and 24 times as massive as our sun. The other type of black holes are supermassive ones, which sit at the center of almost every galaxy, including our own. We don't really know how they form, but we do know that they're unimaginably gigantic, billions of times more massive than our sun.

However, lb1 doesn't fit either of these types. At 70 solar masses, it's too enormous to be a stellar black hole, yet it's too tiny to be a supermassive one. Scientists were scratching their heads, trying to explain this phenomenon. Some theorized that it might not be a single black hole, but two black holes orbiting each other. Others guessed that lb1 was born of a gigantic star that was still in the middle of becoming a black hole. However, the answer was simpler than they thought. lb1 isn't a black hole at all; it's an optical illusion caused by two rare stars orbiting each other. It's a unique star system to stargaze at.

While lb1 didn't upend our understanding of black holes, it's essential to remember that black holes can still blow our minds. For instance, the one at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A star, is as massive as four and a half million suns. Still, there's always a bigger fish in the universe. For instance, Ton 618 is a black hole devouring matter ten billion light years away from us. It's as bright as 140 trillion suns, and its mass is 66 billion times that of our sun. It's horrifyingly big, and scientists began to wonder if even more massive black holes were possible.

The answer came in the form of the stupendously large black hole or slab. These black holes are even more massive than the supermassive ones and have diameters of up to 100 times the distance between the Sun and Pluto. The biggest stupendously large black hole discovered so far sits at the center of Phoenix, a galaxy around eight and a half billion light-years away from us.