A CONTESTED CANDIDATE for the closest black hole to the solar system has proven to be a mirage, a team of astronomers has concluded. The putative black hole lay in the binary HR 6819, some 1,000 light-years away in Telescopium. HR 6819 appears to be a single, bright star, but its spectrum reveals two: a rapidly spinning Be star that's bright blue and skirted by a disk of hot gas, and a second, also bluish but fainter B-type star.
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