The star Aquila is abnormally oscillating, and the culprit turns out to be a black hole, will it affect the Earth?
It's a record-breaker
Recently, when astronomers retrieved the data of 1 billion stars on the Gaia satellite, they found that a star in the constellation Aquila had an abnormal change in orbit, and then discovered a black hole with 33 times the mass of the sun, which is also the second largest black hole in the Milky Way so far, second only to Sagittarius A*, which is 4.4 million times the mass of the Sun at the center of the Milky Way, and has almost reached the upper limit of the mass of the stellar black hole.
Some astronomers believe that there are at least 100 million black holes in the Milky Way, and the closest to the Earth may only be a few hundred light-years, but most of them are small stellar black holes, and most of them have no companion stars to reveal their existence, so they are almost invisible to us.
From the point of view of stellar physics
When a massive star supernova explodes, the inner core will be under more pressure, which will cause the white dwarf to be compressed into neutron stars, and then into black holes, but the stellar black holes we have discovered before are only about 10 to 20 times the mass of the sun, and the mass of BH3 found this time has reached 33 times that of the sun, which can be described as a record.
In 2020, astronomers observed a binary star system, in which the small mass companion star is a black hole, which is only 3.3 times the mass of the Sun and less than 20 kilometers in diameter, which is the smallest black hole discovered so far, but the most confusing thing for astronomers is the formation principle of supermassive black holes in the universe.
At present, the king of black holes in the universe is TON618, which has a mass of 64 billion times that of the sun, and the Schwarzschild radius is more than 1,300 astronomical units, and if it is put in the solar system, all the planets will be swallowed by it.
Some scientists believe that these supermassive black holes originated from the beginning of the Big Bang, belonging to the primordial black holes produced by mass accumulation, because they were born very early, so there is enough time to devour the stars and galaxies in the universe, and finally 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang today, evolved into a super black hole with tens of billions of solar masses.
Since the stellar black holes that were created later did not have as much material to devour, in today's universe there are only stellar black holes with tens of solar masses and supermassive black holes with millions of solar masses and no so-called intermediate-mass black holes.
You may think that black holes are far away from the Earth and have nothing to do with us, but don't forget that our solar system has been flying in the Milky Way at a speed of 220 kilometers per second, and considering that there are at least 100 million black holes in the Milky Way, it is possible that the solar system will encounter wandering black holes on the way to orbit in the future.
Suppose a black hole with several times the mass of the sun passes through the solar system, then the gravitational disturbance it causes may destabilize the asteroid belt and crash into the Earth one after another, and even the Earth itself may be ejected by the gravitational ejection of the black hole.
Whether it is the discovery of the second most massive black hole in the Milky Way, or the black hole that may appear in the collider in the future, they are all part of the secret of the universe, and in the future, we may be able to use the energy of the black hole as a garbage disposal device, and use the accretion disk heat of the black hole to generate electricity.