IS SUN. Sidewalk
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Illustration of the VFTS 243 binary system if we observe it closely. This system, located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, consists of a hot blue star with 25 times the mass of the Sun and a black hole, which is at least nine times the mass of the Sun.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id—An international team of experts, known by the nickname ‘Police Black hole‘ for revealing several discoveries about black holes. Now, they have discovered a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, our neighboring galaxy.
“For the first time, our team has come together to report the discovery of a black hole, not deny it,” said study leader Tomer Shenar. In addition, they found that the star that gave rise to this black hole disappeared without any signs of a strong explosion. This discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with ESO’s VLT Telescope. These findings have also been published in the journal Nature Astronomy on July 18 with the title An X-ray-quiet black hole born with a negligible kick in a massive binary within the Large Magellanic Cloud.
“We identified the ‘needle in the haystack’,” said Shenar, who started the study at KU Leuven in Belgium and is now a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The team has also proposed other similar black hole candidates. However, the team claims this is the first ‘inactive’ stellar mass black hole to be clearly detected. Especially outside our galaxy.
A stellar-mass black hole forms when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity. In a system of two stars revolving around each other, this process leaves the black hole in orbit with a glowing companion star. A black hole is ‘inactive’ if it does not emit high levels of X-ray radiation. That’s how such black holes are usually detected.
“It’s remarkable that we are barely aware of any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe them,” explains co-author Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven. The newly discovered black hole is at least nine times the mass of our Sun. It orbits a hot blue star weighing 25 times the mass of the Sun.
IT’S
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Shining brightly about 160,000 light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula is the most spectacular feature of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This image from the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile shows the region and its rich surroundings in great detail.
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Inactive black holes are very difficult to spot. That’s because they don’t interact much with the environment around them. “For more than two years now, we have been searching for such a black hole binary system,” said co-author Julia Bodensteiner, a researcher at ESO in Germany. “I was thrilled when I heard about VFTS 243, which I think is the most convincing candidate reported to date.”
To find VFTS 243, the collaboration searched nearly 1000 massive stars in the region Nebula Tarantula in the Great Magellanic Cloud. It took six years of observations by the Fiber Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) instrument on the ESO VLT. Researchers are trying to find one that could have a black hole as a companion. Identifying these friends as black holes is very difficult, because there are so many possible alternatives.
“As a researcher who has dismantled potential black holes in recent years, I was very skeptical about this discovery,” said Shenar.
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