A scientist and a detective have very similar jobs. The two explain mysterious clues and devise ways to test their hypotheses. Astronomers also chose the same procedures when examining the star system HR 6819. Czech expert Petr Hadrava also helped them with this. In the end, however, it turned out that everything was different.
It was 2020 when a team led by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that they had discovered a black hole just a thousand light-years away. It was thus the closest object of this type observed in the history of astronomy. It occurred in a binary star system designated HR 6819, in the southern constellation Telescopium.
Its unveiling was preceded by hours of work. She was really black. The majority of similar bodies emit X-rays into their surroundings, which originate from matter, which the insatiable infinity captures. This will reveal itself. But the black hole of the HR 6819 system did not behave like this.
Black hole HR 6819
“We knew that one of the stars orbits every 40 days around an invisible object four times more massive than our Sun, while the other moves away from them. Analysis of data from the MPG/ESO telescope confirmed that it is a black hole,” the leader explained study Thomas Rivinius. The method of “untangling” stellar spectra helped to reveal it. It was developed by an emeritus employee of the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Petr Hadrava.
Source: Youtube
What is also interesting is that the entire system is almost twice as bright as the stated limit of observability with the naked eye. It can be seen in the southern hemisphere from the 34th parallel. Due to this, the discovery of the black hole was considered a milestone in the history of astronomy.
However, the results of the study did not give sleep to many scientists. “The spectral lines defining the motion of the stars can be explained in several ways,” he says Julia Bodensteiner z university KU Leuven v Belgium. “Either it’s a triple system with a black hole and two stars, or it’s just a two-star system in which one of the suns has lost a significant amount of its mass in the recent past.”
Stellar vampirism
The team of Thomas Rivinius therefore teamed up with experts around Julia Bodensteiner. Together they decided to solve the mystery. They were helped by new data obtained from the Very Large Telescope, its interferometer and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer. “We agreed that there are two sources of light in the system. Only suitable instruments were able to reveal how far they are.”
Source: Youtube
The observation confirmed that the pair of stars lie only about a third of the distance apart from the Sun and the Earth. In this case, there is no room for a black hole. “We think we caught the binary star system shortly after one of the bodies sucked up its companion’s atmosphere. So we witnessed the so-called stellar vampirism,” explains Julia Bodensteiner. “While the donor lost part of its material, the recipient experienced an acceleration of rotation, which resembled a black hole in the spectrum.”
Resources: www.eso.org, www.idnes.cz, www.matfyz.cz, www.eso.blog
2023-12-27 08:44:45
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