Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes yet that also happens to be the closest found near Earth, dubbing the rare black hole “the Unicorn.”
“The Unicorn” is named after the constellation Monoceros, which also means unicorn, according to a press release from Ohio State University. The black hole is reported to be nearly three times the mass of the sun and sits just 1,500 light years away from Earth.
Black holes typically are not visible, so researchers were able to discover the Unicorn by analyzing data concerning changes in a nearby red giant star.
“When we looked at the data, this black hole – the Unicorn – just popped out,” lead author Tharindu Jayasinghe, a doctoral student in astronomy at Ohio State, said in the release.
Jayasinghe said he and other researchers noticed something was pulling at the red giant star after they saw that its intensity and appearance had changed.
The pulling is known as a tidal distortion and one possible explanation for that effect is the presence of a black hole.
“Just as the moon’s gravity distorts the Earth’s oceans, causing the seas to bulge toward and away from the moon, producing high tides, so does the black hole distort the star into a football-like shape with one axis longer than the other,” said Todd Thompson, co-author of the study and chair of Ohio State’s astronomy department. “The simplest explanation is that it’s a black hole – and in this case, the simplest explanation is the most likely one.”