Two black holes closest to Earth discovered, of a kind never seen before

Two black holes lurking in Earth's backyard, just 1,560 and 3,800 light-years away, represent a type astronomers have never seen before.

The black holes are named Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2 , as they were discovered from data from the Gaia spacecraft operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

According to Space, Gaia BH1 is located 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, while Gaia BH2 is 3,800 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, in the area known as "Earth's backyard", an area that most telescopes do not point towards.

These are the closest distances to black holes ever discovered around Earth.

Two black holes have just been discovered - (Photo: ESA).

It belongs to a star system that is the complete opposite of our world. Surrounding the Sun are 8 planets and many other celestial bodies, many of which could support life, including a lush, populous Earth.

However, around a star identical to ours in the constellation Ophiuchus, there is only the aforementioned black hole, forming a ghostly, deadly binary star system.

"What makes this new group of black holes different is that they are at large distances from their companion stars," said study leader Kareem E-Badry, who is also with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Plack Institute for Astronomy in Germany .

Stellar mass black holes, or small black holes like Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2, can accompany a star and produce a system that glows in X-rays in observations.

They are often quite close together and interact, with the black hole slowly eating away at the companion star, which causes the system to shine.

However, these two black holes are far away, completely dark because the gravitational effect they exert on their companions does not help them glow. How these strangely distant pairs come to be remains unclear.

Scientists hope the answer will be found as more similar systems are revealed, a difficult task because these dark black holes are so difficult to observe—which is why they are so close to Earth and have remained hidden for so long.

The most massive of all black holes are the monster black holes (supermassive black holes) at the center of galaxies. For example, the black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way galaxy has the mass of 4 million suns.