Black Hole That Was Closest Yet Found Does Not Exist, Say Scientists in U-turn

Researchers have a new view of HR 6819: two stars, one of them a "vampire." From a report: Astronomers who thought they had discovered a black hole on our cosmic doorstep have said they were mistaken, instead revealing they have found a two-star system involving a stellar "vampire." The system, known as HR 6819 in the constellation Telescopium, was in the headlines in 2020 when researchers announced it contained a black hole. At just 1,000 light years from Earth, it was the closest yet found to our planet. At the time 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, suggesting a black hole and one star orbited each other while the second star moved in a wider orbit. Now the researchers say they were mistaken: the black hole does not exist. Dietrich Baade, an emeritus astronomer at European Southern Observatory (ESO) and a co-author of the work, said just one blob of light was previously detected, containing the hallmarks of two stars. Since both stars are of similar brightness and the same age, they would normally have the same mass and would whirl each other around with similar, high velocity. "Since we saw that only one of the stars was whirled around at high velocity by some massive object, which we didn't see, we assumed this unseen massive object to be a third body, namely a black hole," he said.

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