Observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii have revealed that stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy have mysteriously lost their binary companion.
Stars often come in multiples near our Sun, with a binary star system percentage of 70%, meaning that 70 out of 100 stars are in binary systems. They’re all in pairs or triplets, but in the center of the Milky Way, it’s a different story.
A team led by Devin Chu of the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed 10 years of observations tracking 28 stars orbiting the central black hole in our galaxy known as Sagittarius. a With a mass 4.1 million times that of a black hole, all stars orbit within a light-month (480 billion miles or 777 billion km) of the black hole.
Sixteen of these stars have been namedS stars.Named after the black hole, it is very young (less than six million years old) and has a mass tens of times that of our sun. space.
Zhou’s team searched for spectral binaries. Sometimes even our best telescopes can’t resolve a binary system into two individual stars. In such cases, the only way to distinguish the components is to look at their combined spectrum and observe the Doppler shift. Light from stars that orbit each other.
However, the team found cho that none of the stars exist Q Are they binaries – all confusing and unique predictions that massive stars usually form in binary or even triple systems. From their observations, Zhou and colleagues were able to determine an upper bound for the diode breaking around the arc. a * The maximum is 47%, which is much lower than our solar environment.
“This difference speaks to the incredibly interesting environment of the center of our galaxy,” Chu said. “We are not dealing with a natural environment here.”
Assuming that these massive stars formed in pairs, what happened to their companions? One possibility is that the black hole’s massive gravity could rip binary systems apart and drive a star entirely out of the galaxy. million miles per hour (1.6 km) million kilometers per hour).
Another possibility is that the black hole’s gravity disrupted the binary systems enough for star pairs to collide and merge. The merged star is regenerating and looks much younger than it really is, which may explain why stars that appear so young are found in environments where they are unlikely to exist.
