This artist's concept shows a supermassive black hole at the center of a remote galaxy digesting the remnants of a star. The area around the black hole appears warped because the gravity of the black hole acts like a lens, twisting and distorting light. Image Credit: NASA
QUESTION: Where is the closest black hole and how far away is it?
ANSWER: It is actually difficult to determine the distance to black holes, but a nearby object believed to be a black hole from observations of strong X-ray emission is Cygnus X-1, located about 8,000 light years away. Cyg X-1 is an ordinary star that is believed to be orbiting a black hole.
There are other nearby candidates for black holes which include :
- GRO J0422+32 =V518 Per 1.39 kpc or 2 kpc
- A0620-00 = V616 Mon 0.87 kpc or 1.05 kpc
- XTE J1118+480 0.83 kpc or 1.8 kpc
NOTES:
- kpc stands for kiloparsec, or approximately 3250 light years
- Black Hole: An object whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from it.
- X-ray: Electromagnetic radiation of very short wavelength and very high-energy; X-rays have shorter wavelengths than ultraviolet light but longer wavelengths than gamma rays.
- Light Year: A unit of length used in astronomy which equals the distance light travels in a year. At the rate of 300,000 kilometers per second (671 million miles per hour), 1 light-year is equivalent to 9.46053 x 1012 km, 5,880,000,000,000 miles
- Georgia & Koji for “Ask an Astrophysicist”
