2024-04-18 05:00:05
A research paper by a team of astronomers claiming to have accidentally discovered the largest stellar-mass black hole ever detected in the Milky Way Galaxy has been published in the astronomical journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.announcementIt was done.
Stellar-mass black holes are formed by the gravitational collapse of a star, usually via a supernova explosion. It is much smaller than supermassive black holes such as Sgr A*, which is located at the center of our galaxy. Sagittarius A* has a mass about 4 million times that of the Sun, while the newly discovered stellar-mass black hole, Gaia BH3, has a mass about 33 times that of the Sun.
unexpected discovery
Gaia BH3 is about 2,000 light years away in the constellation Aquila, making it the second closest known black hole to Earth. Most of them are less than 10 times the mass of the Sun, and Cygnus X-1, the second-largest stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy, is only 21 times the mass of the Sun.
“No one expected that we would find a high-mass black hole lurking nearby, undetected until now,” said Pasquale Panuzzo, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He said, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery in my research career.” Panuzzo is a member of Project Gaia, a collaborative research project that aims to create a detailed three-dimensional map of the galaxy.
companion
The research team discovered Gaia BH3 from observation data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia astronomical observation satellite. Preparations were being made for large-scale data release to the scientific community, scheduled for 2025.
Data from the Gaia satellite detected an influence on the orbit of a companion star that forms a binary system with Gaia BH3. The observations were double-checked using data from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) giant telescope VLT, located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, South America.
metal-deficient star
The discovery of such massive stellar black holes provides evidence that black holes can form through the collapse of metal-poor stars, which contain few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In astronomy, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium (heavy elements) are collectively called “metals.” Gaia BH3’s companion star has been found to have extremely low metal content, suggesting that the star that collapsed to form Gaia BH3 was also metal-deficient.
Because metal-deficient stars lose relatively little mass during their lifetimes, they are thought to leave behind more material at the end of their lives, forming high-mass black holes.
The authors decided to publish their findings early so that other astronomers can quickly begin studying this exceptional black hole. It is hoped that this will help clarify whether Gaia BH3 draws in substances from its surroundings.
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