Black hole that was closest yet found does not exist, say scientists in U-turn

Astronomers thought they had found a black hole on our doorstep, but instead found a two-star system with a stellar.

The system, known as HR 6819 in the constellation Telescopium, was in the headlines in 2020 when researchers announced it contained a black hole. It was the closest thing to our planet yet.

The team behind the work said the presence of a black hole was necessary to make sense of the movement of two stars in the system.

The black hole does not exist according to the researchers.

The hallmarks of two stars were found in a single blob of light, according to an astronomer who co-authored the work.

Both stars have the same brightness and age, so they would whirl each other around with the same mass.

Since we didn't see a black hole, we assumed it was a third body, since only one of the stars was whirled around at high speed.

The system contained two stars alone, one of which had recently been stripped of mass by the second, making the latter far more massive, according to other researchers.

Baade and colleagues report how the groups worked together to analyse the data from the Very Large Telescope Interferometer.

The co-author of the study said that science should be about the open questions that everyone is trying to solve and not about who was right or wrong.

The two stars would have a large separation if a black hole was present. The stars would be expected to be closer together in a scenario with no black hole.

There was no indication of a second star in the VLT results. The data suggested that both stars were sitting close to each other and that they contributed to the light captured from a single bright source.

The data from the VLTI showed that the two stars were in close proximity.

The stripped star can be easily caught by the second star because it has lost most of its mass.

The researchers are still upbeat despite the findings not showing a black hole.

Baade said that the stripped star is more exciting than the black hole because it was caught in a phase that lasts only a small fraction of the system's lifetime.

The excitement is not about the low chances of finding a star, but about the stripped star revealing the inner part of the star. The stripping has removed the thick curtain of the outer layers so that we can see where the star has generated the energy that it is sending away and has synthesised new elements.

Baade said that the stardust could form new stars and planets when it was ejected.