In 2020, a team of astronomers with the
European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered the
closest black hole to Earth in the HR 6819 system, just 1,000 light-years away, only to have other scientists dispute the findings.
As it turns out, those critics seem to have been correct. In new research, an international team of scientists led by researcher Abigail Frost of KU Leuven in Belgium has disproved the existence of a
black hole in HR 6819.
The original research, published in a 2020 paper authored by ESO astronomer Thomas Rivinius, determined that HR 6819 was a triple system, with one star closely orbiting a black hole and another star in a wide orbit. But a 2020 study by Julia Bodensteiner, then a Ph.D. candidate at KU Leuven and now a fellow with ESO, posited that the system could also contain just two stars if one was stripping away and absorbing much of the mass of the other, a phenomenon that's sometimes referred to as "
stellar vampirism."
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