A star wiggling oddly around in space may be the signpost to one of the most sought-after objects in the galaxy.
Some 5,825 light-years from Earth, a red giant star has been spotted moving as though in a slow orbital dance with a binary companion. The problem? There’s absolutely no light coming from the place where the binary companion should be.
It gets more interesting. Based on the behavior of the red giant, astronomers led by Song Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have determined that the mass of the invisible object is just 3.6 times the mass of the Sun. There’s only one thing it could be: a black hole, one with a petite size that’s smack bang in the middle of a mysterious void in the data known as the lower mass gap.
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