Closest Black Hole to Earth Found "Hiding in Plain Sight"

MrPlow writes:

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During winter in the Southern Hemisphere, a blue point of light in the constellation Telescopium gleams overhead. The brilliant pinprick on the sky, which looks like a bright star, is actually two stars in close orbit-accompanied by the closest known black hole to Earth.

The newly discovered black hole is about 1,011 light-years from our solar system in the star system HR 6819. Unveiled today in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the invisible object is locked in an orbit with two visible stars. It's estimated to be about four times the mass of the sun and roughly 2,500 light-years closer than the next black hole.

"It seems like it's been hiding in plain sight," says astronomer Kareem El-Badry, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in binary star systems but wasn't involved with the study. "It's a bright enough star [system] that people have been studying it since the 80s, but it seems like it's had some surprises."

[...] On a human scale, a thousand light-years is an immense distance. If a model of the Milky Way were scaled so that Earth and the sun were only a hair's width apart, HR 6819 would be about four miles away. But in the grand scheme of the galaxy, which is more than 100,000 light-years across, HR 6819 is quite close, and it suggests the Milky Way is littered with black holes.

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