Yikes! Black holes might be closer to Earth than we thought
Representational image of black hole.
Black holes are curiously scary things. They gobble up anything and everything and they don't even spare light, the fastest travelling form of energy in the universe. Anything that comes too close to a black hole, a star, a planet or anything else, is sure to be torn apart and slowly consumed by the thing possessing the strongest known gravitational force in the universe.
It's safe to assume that it is always best to keep a large distance between yourself and a black hole.
Since we can't 'directly' see them. It's not possible to peer in space and simply count their accurate number. A black hole can become visible when it is active, that is when it is destroying a star or a planet or anything.
Currently, we only know of around 20 stellar mass black holes in our Milky Way galaxy. And we thought that the closest candidate among these was comfortably sitting around 1565 light-years away from Earth.
But anew study says there can be a black hole much closer to home.
A team of astronomers has analysed and modelled the Hyades cluster, which is a group of stars just 150 light-years away. The team thinks that there may be two or three stellar mass black holes there.
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"Our simulations can only simultaneously match the mass and size of the Hyades if some black holes are present at the centre of the cluster today (or until recently)," says astrophysicist Stefano Torniamenti of the University of Padua in Italy as quoted by ScienceAlert.
The Hyades cluster is thought to be 625 million years old.
The black holes the astronomers are referring to are either present in the cluster or they were ejected less than 150 million years ago, says the study. In the latter case, they may be hovering around the outskirts of the cluster.
So are we in danger? Well, the scientists think that even if one of these black holes is moving, it is moving at a speed of 3 kilometres per second. And even if it moving in our direction, it will take a very, very long time for it to reach us.
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