Wednesday 13 May 2020

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Building on their previous discoveries the European Southern Observatory (ESO) based in Chile has found a so called quiet black hole relatively quite nearby in a star system visible to the unaided eye, located somewhat ironically in the minor constellation of the southern celestial hemisphere called Telescopium.
One of the fourteen of the eighty-eight star formations credited to the astronomer and geographer Abbรฉ Nicolas-Louis de la Caille (*1713 – †1762) who catalogued over ten thousand stars, Telescopium like many of the newly mapped groupings was named after contemporary tools and implements: a clock, a microscope, a chisel, navigation devices, etc. A thousand light years distant, the black hole is dark companion to a binary star system (QV Telescopii), its presence betrayed by its gravitational distortion of the orbiting pair, giving researchers the clues and tools to find more cryptic black holes in the neighbourhood. Learn more at the Universe Today at the link above.