A stellar black hole, with a mass weighing 33 times that of the sun, has been discovered 2,000 light years from Earth. The black hole belongs to the family of stellar black holes which result from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their life.
It was “by chance” that Gaia BH3 was discovered, says Pasquale Panuzzo, CNRS researcher at the Paris-PSL Observatory. “Perhaps because the black hole would have formed in another smaller galaxy, which would have been eaten at the beginning of the life of the Milky Way,” he suggests. The ESA (European Space Agency) Gaia probe has been operating 1.5 million kilometers from Earth for 10 years, delivering a 3D map of the positions and movements of more than 1.8 billion stars in the galaxy. The study suggests that the “progenitor” of the black Hole was a massive star that was also poor in metals. The system's star, 12 billion years old, "ages very slowly", while the one that formed the blackhole "only lived 3 million years"