Black Hole is Closest to Earth, Among the Smallest Ever Discovered

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Black hole is closest to Earth, among the smallest ever discovered:

Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes on record - and the closest one to Earth found to date.

Researchers have dubbed it "The Unicorn," in part because it is, so far, one of a kind, and in part because it was found in the constellation Monoceros - "The Unicorn."

[...] The Unicorn is about three times the mass of our sun - tiny for a black hole. Very few black holes of this mass have been found in the universe. This black hole is 1,500 light years away from Earth, still inside the Milky Way galaxy. And, until Jayasinghe started analyzing it, it was essentially hiding in plain sight.

The black hole appears to be a companion to a red giant star, meaning that the two are connected by gravity.[...]

But in this case, they can see the black hole's companion star. That star had been well-documented by telescope systems including KELT , run out of Ohio State; ASAS, the precursor to ASAS-SN , which is now run out of Ohio State, and TESS, a NASA satellite that searches for planets outside our solar system. Data about it had been widely available but hadn't yet been analyzed in this way.

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