jcampbelly t1_jeam8b2 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 4:59 PM

Reply to comment by Andromeda321 in Gaia discovers a new family of black holes: astronomers studied the orbits of stars and noticed that some of them wobbled on the sky, as if they were gravitationally influenced by massive objects. No light could be found using telescopes, leaving only one possibility: black holes. by Andromeda321

Congrats and thanks! A very interesting read. And the Gaia mission is so damn cool. A compass and map to inform and recommend potential other missions. The Sagan Summer Workshop on Gaia was very accessible: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIbTYGsIVYti7z5CHoiS5BJlT11gHUtgt

Perhaps it's just a small black hole in a small solar system that eventually devoured up everything in its neighborhood, leaving nothing to accelerate from its polar jets. You'd expect a black hole formation to be violent and leave remnants, but if it happened so long ago that the remnants were all eventually devoured or flung off, it might just be alone in dark. Is the companion very old?

Does the Gaia data show it having a trajectory moving with the galaxy or "through" it? Perhaps it happened elsewhere and the remnants were left behind in some ejection event that stripped the system of its lighter elements and sent the more massive objects tumbling through the galaxy.

I love how the Gaia data just keeps building on itself. And the next release is expected to dump something like 10,000 exoplanet candidates. That's huge...