Confirmation of a binary system about 160,000 light-years away, difficult to confirm because there is no interaction with the surroundings
In the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) next to our Milky Way, a ‘sleeping’ stellar black hole that does not interact with the surrounding celestial bodies was discovered for the first time and reported to academia.
Dr. Thomas Schenard, a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, published the results of the discovery of a stellar dormant black hole in the binary system ‘VFTS 243’ in the Tarantula Nebula, about 160,000 light-years from Earth, in ‘Nature Astronomy’. .
According to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and foreign media, Dr. Shenar described finding this dormant black hole as ‘finding a needle in a haystack’.
This black hole, which has 9 times the mass of the Sun, forms a dual star system with a star 25 times the mass of the Sun, but unlike a normal black hole that sucks in surrounding matter and emits powerful X-rays, it produces no signal.
The black hole was confirmed by its effect on the surrounding celestial body, but there was no such signal.
The research team predicted that the stars remaining in VFTS 243 would eventually become black holes and merge with existing black holes.
Black holes voraciously suck up almost all matter, such as gas, dust, and stars, that have a gravitational influence on them, and when their companions are far away, they have no material to suck up and are known to become dormant black holes that do not emit X-rays.
These dormant black holes are thought to be relatively numerous, but they rarely interact with their surroundings, making them very difficult to spot.
The expression “finding a needle in a haystack” reflects this difficulty.
There have been many reports that dormant black holes have been discovered before, but later confirmed to be false.
The research team led by Dr. Shenar has also served as a discriminant to determine the authenticity of a dormant black hole, and eventually found the dormant black hole on its own.
“As a researcher who over the past few years has shown that potential black holes are not real black holes, I was initially extremely skeptical of this discovery,” he said.
Dr. Karim El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, said, “When I was first asked to reconfirm from Dr. Shenar, I was skeptical, but I could not find any other possible explanations other than black holes.” It is the first celestial body that people have discovered after decades of hard work.”
The research team confirmed the existence of a dormant black hole after analyzing nearly 1,000 large stars in the Tarantula Nebula over six years using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) supergiant telescope (VLT) installed in Chile.
Unlike supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, stellar black holes are formed when large stars explode as supernovae in the final stage of evolution. It was analyzed that it was formed by disintegration.
The near-perfect circular orbit of the companion star was suggested as evidence of the absence of an explosion.
If a supernova explosion had occurred, the explosive force would have deflected the new black hole to one side, creating an elliptical orbit, but this is not the case.
/yunhap news