Gaia Black hole 3 tools

On 16 April 2024, the discovery of Gaia BH3 was announced by ESA in its press release "ESA Press release: Sleeping giant surprises Gaia scientists". The preliminary Gaia data that lead to this discovery was published along with the paper and can be found on Vizier.

Orbit fitting of Gaia Black Hole 3

A python code repository that demonstrates the analysis of the Gaia measurement time series that led to the discovery of the black hole Gaia BH3 is available from the link below:

Gaia BH3 python code on Github

The notebook for fitting the orbit of Gaia BH3 and determining the black hole's mass can be executed online without the need for any software installation from the link below:

Execute the code online directly

The DOI for this resource:

When applicable, please reference the discovery paper (Gaia Collaboration, Panuzzo, et. al. 2024 "Discovery of a dormant 33 solar-mass black hole in pre-release Gaia astrometry") and the DOI associated with this notebook repository. It is also good practice to acknowledge/cite the individual python packages where appropriate.

BINARYS

BINARYS is a tool allowing to combine the Hipparcos and/or Gaia absolute astrometric data with relative astrometry and/or radial velocity measurements to determine the orbits of binary systems. BINARYS has been updated to work with Gaia BH3 data and was originally already published on the Gaia Community Tools page. This tool can be found from the link below.

Access BINARYS

Published 16 April 2024