OVERVIEW
] BLACK HOLEGaia BH1 is a stellar-mass black hole in the constellation Ophiuchus, 1560 from Earth. Its mass is 9.60 . It was discovered in 2022.
The nearest known dormant black hole, found not by X-rays but by the wobble it induces in a Sun-like companion that orbits it once a year.
- WHAT IT IS
- Stellar-mass black hole
- HOW FAR
- 1560
The light arriving now left it that long ago.
THE MODEL
] SHADOW ONLYCALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · SCHWARZSCHILD RADIUS FROM THE MASS · 9.6 M☉ · ACCRETION DORMANT
The black disc is the shadow, 2.6 times wider than the horizon that casts it, and every ray in the frame is a null geodesic of the Schwarzschild metric. Nothing is falling in, so there is nothing else to see. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, drawn from where the camera actually is — but every one of them is within 170 parsecs of the Sun and this object is much further out, so what is in the frame is that whole neighbourhood seen from outside it, piled into a knot around the Sun. The rest of the sky from here is not something this catalogue knows.
IMAGES
] 1 FRAMES- Meli thev
CC BY-SA 4.0
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Gaia BH1 for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
Say where you are, and this line says when Gaia BH1 is worth going out for.
APPARENT PLACE
] EQUINOX J2026.7Where a telescope has to be pointed today, which is not quite where the catalogue records the object: the coordinate grid itself has turned since the year 2000 the catalogue is referred to.
- RIGHT ASCENSION
- DECLINATION
- GRID TURNED SINCE
- 20.8
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-08-27 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Gaia BH1, so nothing here moves the object; what separates this from the catalogued position above is the coordinate grid turning under it — about fifty arcseconds a year of precession since 2000, and the small nodding of the Earth’s axis on top of that. Aberration and refraction are not included, and neither is parallax; each is under an arcminute, which is also about as well as the catalogued position is known. The same figure for any date.
CATALOG DATA
] 2 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
WHAT IT IS MADE OF
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Accretion state
- dormant — no detected accretion
- Mass
- 9.6
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 1 DESIGNATIONS- Common name Gaia BH1
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
] 1 SERVICEEach link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.
- VizieR5″ around 262.1712 -0.5810
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. Gaia BH1 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/gaia-bh1
@misc{spacecatalog_gaia-bh1,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Gaia BH1}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/gaia-bh1},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from SpaceCatalog curated data.}
}The values above were taken from SpaceCatalog curated data — CC-BY-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.
RECENT ACTIVITY
] 3 ITEMS- Searching for the Third Wheel: High-Contrast Imaging Constraints on Tertiaries to Black Hole and Neutron Star Binaries2026-05-15 · arXiv · PAPER · Pranav Nagarajan, Kareem El-Badry, Aniket Sanghi
- Radial Velocity Orbital Solutions for Candidate Black Hole and Neutron Star Binary Systems in the Gaia Data Release 3 Catalog2026-03-20 · arXiv · PAPER · Joshua D. Simon, Casey Y. Lam, Kareem El-Badry, Henrique Reggiani, Sukanya Chakrabarti, Puragra Guhathakurta
- Evolution of wide O star binaries through their LBV stage. Population synthesis with mass-ejection-driven orbital evolution2026-03-16 · arXiv · PAPER · Xiao-Tian Xu, Philipp Podsiadlowski, Norbert Langer, Xue-Feng Wang, Xiang-Dong Li, Alexander Heger
arXiv · UPDATED DAILY