“Closest black hole” system found to contain no black hole Astronomers have gotten a good look at what happens when a "vampire" star sucks the outer layers of material from a companion star, stripping this "bitten" victim down to a mere stellar core. In 2020 a team led by European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers reported the closest black hole to Earth, located just 1000 light-years away in the HR 6819 system. But the results of their study were contested by other researchers, including by an international team based at KU Leuven, Belgium. In a paper published on Wednesday, these two teams have united to report that there is in fact no black hole in HR 6819, which is instead a “vampire” two-star system in a rare and short-lived stage of its evolution. The original study on...
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