Astronomers discover closest black hole to earth, can be seen with naked eye

The astronomers have discovered a black hole 1,000 light-years from Earth. It was found in the system called HR 6819, in the constellation Telescopium.

The finding was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.   

The system looks like a single bright star when watched through a telescope, but the light emitted previously from the system revealed that there are two starts present.

After a detailed analysis of the requisite data, the astronomers found that a black hole with a mass over four times that of our sun, and just 1,000 light-years from Earth.

“We realised that one could not describe what we saw with just two stars,” Dietrich Baade, an emeritus astronomer at European Southern Observatory (ESO) told the Guardian.

“One of the stars is moving periodically, with a period of 40 days. And the only way to understand that period and the very large [velocity] of 60km per second with a mass five times that of the sun was to infer that there is another very massive body which, however, is not visible,” he added.

Baade said that this black hole is 'truly black', adding that the star is 'not so massive', and loses a lot of gas which makes it dark. “It may also be the first-ever [black hole of this kind],” he said.

He also said that the system HR 6819 and its stars can be seen with the naked eyes. “If you want to see it really overhead, you need to be at the southern tip of South America,” Baade said.

A black hole is an object which is formed from the gravitational collapse of a massive star.