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Paris: The circle of known black holes in the universe is expanding, with a team of astrophysicists announcing the discovery of the first “dormant” stellar-mass black hole orbiting another star in a neighboring galaxy.
While these black holes are believed to be common in the universe, they have proven difficult to find.
The international team found a “needle in a haystack,” said astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam Tomer Schinar, lead author of the new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Black hole
The team was searching in the sky for an object that eventually turned out to be a binary black hole, in which two black holes orbit each other following swallowing their stars in a supernova explosion.
“We found a massive star that weighs 25 times the mass of our sun and orbits something we don’t see,” Shinar told AFP.
Researchers believe that the blue star, located in the large Magellanic Cloud galaxy that neighbors the Milky Way, is constantly associated with a black hole nine times the mass of our sun.
These types of black holes are usually discovered by X-rays they emit while collecting material from their companion star.
But this binary system, known as VFTS243, is described as “dormant” because it does not emit X-rays and is not close enough to absorb matter from its star.
The Milky Way alone is believed to contain regarding 100 million stellar-mass black holes, which are much smaller than its large, super-massive siblings, said astrophysicist KU Leuven in Belgium.
swallow the star
But Sana, a co-author of the study, explained that only ten such black holes have been found.
This may be because many of these wormholes remain dormant, taking a long time to eventually swallow their companion star.
Sana pointed out that observing these holes was like watching two people dancing in a dark room, one wearing white and the other wearing black. One may only be visible, but the other is also present.
“We have never discovered such systems before,” Shinar told AFP. “There have been a few claims in the past years, but they have been more or less refuted.”
In fact, members of his team were among those who rejected previous discoveries of black holes, putting forward alternative hypotheses for what the data might indicate.
For this reason, Shinar said he and his team members expect more scrutiny of the discovery.
Shinar pointed out that the team members dropped all other possibilities precisely, until they were convinced that “either in front of an invisible, obese alien, or a black hole.”
Then the researchers used the most famous black hole detector they know.
Badri
Shinar explained that Karim El-Badri of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has been “revealing black holes one by one” for the past two years, and has been dubbed a “black hole destroyer.”
“I sent him the data and said, ‘Listen, we found this thing – prove me wrong,'” Shinar added.
“I had my doubts,” said Al-Badri, who joined the team and ran its simulations, “but I mightn’t find a plausible explanation for the data that didn’t link that to black holes.”
This discovery might give a glimpse into how black holes form.
It is believed that stellar-mass black holes were born during the death of a large star, in a supernova explosion.
The force of the explosion causes black holes in a binary system to be in an elliptical rather than a circular orbit.
However, VFTS243 has a perfectly circular orbit as well.
“This means that the star immediately disappeared into the black hole,” Shinar said, adding, “This has a lot of implications in terms of how these pairs of black holes are formed,” and therefore the star “VFTS 243” might eventually collapse in a similar way. .
“This is important evidence that all these stars may not end their lives in supernova explosions,” said Andrew Norton, an astrophysicist at Britain’s Open University, who was not involved in the study.
Chinar said he welcomed other scholars trying to refute the allegations in this regard.
“If someone comes along and debunks this as well, I’m sure they’ll have a great explanation, something like a fat alien (hypothesis),” he added.
