A Plot Twist in the Milky Way
Astronomers have cracked a mystery 1,000 light-years from Earth.
In the spring of 2020, a group of astronomers told the world a dramatic story: They had discovered a black hole just 1,000 light-years away from Earth, closer to us than any they’d found before. They’d detected it in a constellation called Telescopium, nestled alongside two stars that, on a clear night in the Southern Hemisphere, are visible to the naked eye. “On the scale of the Milky Way, it’s in our backyard,” Thomas Rivinius, the astronomer who led the new research, told me at the time.
It turns out that the finding was just the first chapter, because there’s been.
