Karim El-Badri, an Egyptian researcher who makes an amazing discovery in astronomy

Al-Badri is an astrophysicist in Harvard university American, where his Egyptian origins go back to his father, but he lived all his life in the United States and cannot speak Arabic, indicating that his main task at the university is to conduct research and guide students..

Al-Badri was born in Roseburg, Oregon, and received a BA Astrophysics In 2016, he received his doctorate in astrophysics in 2021 from the University of California at Berkeley, then moved to Harvard University, according to his personal page on the university’s website..

1500 Light year

And about details new discovery Al-Badri said in an exclusive interview with “Sky News Arabia” that he continued to use the “Gaia” spacecraft of the European Space Agency, identifying interesting things to follow using the telescopesCoordination of notes and writing of the research paper.

And about the difference between the black hole he discovered and other black holes, he said that “Black hole Which he discovered with his research team at a distance of about 1500 light years,” he added, adding: “The closest previously known black hole is located 3 times from Earth, about 4500 light years away.”“.

Al-Badri notes that he has been searching for (dormant) black holes for the past four years using a wide range of data, adding: “My previous attempts – as well as those of others – have led to a number of binary systems masquerading as black holes, but these are the For the first time, the research has paid off“.

Alleged discoveries

He continues: “There have been many alleged discoveries of such systems, and almost all of these discoveries were later refuted. This is the first unambiguous discovery of a sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy.“.

He explains that “black holes Small and dark, if they are isolated, they are difficult to find, but if they are in a binary system – that is, orbiting a star – their presence can be more easily detected by the star’s gravitational effects.“.

He believes that there have been a lot of false reports about discoveries of black holes in the past few years, as explorers of them interact with binaries containing two luminous stars..

Binary stars, according to NASA’s website, are those that orbit each other, which is distinguished by this term from double stars that are close together by chance, and although the numbers are not exact, between a third to half of the stars in the universe are part of a binary star system..

a decade

According to research paper published on the discovery, Karim and his team relied on data obtained by the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory.

The mission took nearly a decade to measure the appropriate locations, distances and motions of nearly a billion astronomical objects, such as stars, planets, comets, asteroids and galaxies..

By tracking the motion of objects as they orbit the center of the Milky Way (a technique known as astronomy), the Gaia mission aims to create the most accurate 3D space catalog ever made..

Al-Badri and his team examined the number of stars of 168,065 in the Gaia 3 data release, which are most likely binocular orbits, and found a dark star they called “Gaia PH1”.“.

According to Gaia data, which monitors how the star moves in the sky, the orbit size and duration give a limitation on the mass of the dark star, and to ensure that the Gaia analysis is correct, alternatives to the black hole were excluded, and it was noted that the dark star was spectralized using several other telescopes, and it was proven that it is indeed dark.

According to the research paper, “Gaia PH1” is completely different from black holes The other star is known in binaries, especially since the other star is bright and slowly rotating.