00:03black holes are notoriously hard to detect as anything which crosses one of their event horizons
00:08even light can never escape again and that's likely why astronomers have just discovered one
00:13of these cosmic mysteries essentially right around the corner from our solar system this
00:17black hole was named gaia bh3 and while it's the second closest one we've ever detected and only
00:241924 light years away it's interesting for another reason as bh3 is the largest stellar mass black
00:29hole ever detected in the milky way bh3 is some 33 times the mass of our sun or more than
00:35three
00:36times the size of the closest stellar mass black hole so how is it discovered well it's in a binary
00:41orbit with a star whose movement couldn't be explained other than by an unseen companion
00:45this is an artist's impression of what that star's elliptical orbit might look like with the black
00:50hole sitting stationary and the star moving in a wide arc around it researchers say one orbit around
00:56the black hole takes the star roughly 11.6 years and while this is the largest one ever discovered
01:01experts estimate stellar mass black holes in our galaxy have an upper range of 100 million solar
01:06masses however many are detected only if and when they gobble up a companion star an event which
01:12actually generates a ton of heat something we can actually detect
