2023-06-18 19:00:00
Written by Muhammad Ayman
Sunday, June 18, 2023 10:00 PM
Astronomers have discovered that young, massive stars are near the black hole for the Milky Way They are single, not binary, a finding that goes against the normal formation of massive stars.
The black hole’s extreme environment causes these stellar binaries to merge or disrupt, resulting in fewer binary pairs than similar stars near Earth.
The results support a scenario in which a supermassive black hole drives nearby stars to either merge or crash, with one of the pair being kicked out of the system. When supermassive stars are born, they are always paired up as twins, and the two stars usually orbit each other.
But astronomers at UCLA’s Galactic Center Group and Keck Observatory analyzed more than a decade’s worth of data on 16 supermassive stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and their findings, which were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, for a startling finding: they are all singular.
but why? Do stars about 10 times more massive than our Sun form on their own in the hostile environment around a black hole? Did the black hole expel their “twins”? Or pairs of stars merged to form single stars?
The results support a scenario in which the central supermassive black hole causes nearby stellar binaries to merge or collapse, with one of the pair being ejected from the system.
The stars the scientists have observed are known as S stars, and most of them are young — they formed within the past 6 million years — and they’re massive, with most located within a light-month, or just under 500 billion miles, of the black hole.
“Stars this young should not even have been near the black hole in the first place,” said University of California researcher Devin Chu, first author of the study. “They could not have migrated to this region in just 6 million years, but it is surprising that You have star form in such a hostile environment.”
Zhu and his colleagues used data taken with Keck’s adaptive optics tools to conduct the first-ever search for spectral S interstellar binary stars. Through optical telescopes, spectral binary stars appear as single stars, but when the emitted light is analyzed by scientists, the detection Its actually pairs of stars.
More surprisingly, the researchers found that the number of pairs of S stars that could exist near the black hole was much lower than the number of similar stars in the section of space around Earth’s sun, known as the solar neighborhood.
They did this by calculating a measure called the binary fraction, which determines how many stars in a given area can come in pairs; The higher the binary fraction, the more stars can exist in pairs. Previous studies showed that the binary fraction of S-like stars in Earth’s solar neighborhood is about 70%. In the new study, the researchers found that near the black hole of the Milky Way, the The upper limit is only 47% – indicating that the black hole’s extreme environment limits the survival of stellar binaries.
The UCLA researchers now plan to explore how the limit on the binary fraction they calculated compares with the binary fraction for similar stars that are further away from the black hole but are still gravitationally influencing.
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