Earth's 'closest black hole' turns out to be a 'vampire' star system instead: study

New research suggests the 2020 discovery of Earth's closest black hole just 1,000 light-years away is actually a two-star system with a 'vampire' star, but no black hole.

In the original 2020 report, a team led by European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers identified the closest black hole to Earth, in the HR 6819 star system. While the discovery garnered much attention, the results of that study were contested by other researchers, including a team based out of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), a university in Belgium.

The two teams united to release a new paper, published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, which suggests that HR 6819 has no black hole.

Thomas Rivinius, an ESO astronomer and lead author on the original 2020 paper, and his colleagues thought in 2020 that HR 6819 was a triple system, with one star orbiting a black hole every 40 days and a second star in a much wider orbit.

Black holes are notoriously hard to locate. According to NASA, "By its very nature, a black hole cannot be seen."