Scientists have discovered what may be the smallest-known black hole in the Milky Way galaxy and the closest to our solar system – an object so curious that they nicknamed it ‘the Unicorn.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nicknamed \u2018Unicorn\u2019 the researchers said the black hole is roughly three times the mass of our Sun, testing the lower limits of size for these extraordinarily dense objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A luminous red giant star orbits with the black hole in a so-called binary star system named V723 Mon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The black hole is located about 1,500 light years – the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) – from Earth. While it may be the closest one to us, it is still far away. By way of comparison, the closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is 4 light years away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Black holes like this one form when massive stars die and their cores collapse. The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Scientists have discovered what may be the smallest-known black hole in the Milky Way galaxy and the closest to our solar system – an object so curious that they nicknamed it ‘the Unicorn.’ Daily Current Affairs Quiz 2021 Nicknamed \u2018Unicorn\u2019 the researchers said the black hole is roughly three times the mass of our Sun, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":404,"featured_media":41405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1403],"tags":[68,868],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-41404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current-affairs-april-2021","tag-science-technology-current-affairs","tag-space-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/404"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41404"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41406,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41404\/revisions\/41406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41404"},{"taxonomy":"offerexpiration","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gkseries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/offerexpiration?post=41404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}