Passive Black Hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud

A team of astronomers known as the Black Hole Police discovered a black hole passive in the Great Magellanic Cloud.

Like looking for a needle in hay. That is what happened in this research. Astronomers search for passive galaxies in a binary star system in the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in the dwarf galaxy The Great Magellanic Cloud.

This search involved 1000 massive stars in nebula tarantula. And definitely not easy to find black hole passive stellar mass. The black hole we are looking for is not easy to detect because it is passive or has no interaction with the surrounding environment.

Black Hole Detection

Black holes do not emit light. Therefore we cannot observe it. However, the gravity of the black hole is so great that the black hole can interact with the material around it. In that interaction, the material surrounding the black hole will be drawn into the black hole or appear to flow down onto the devouring monster.

In addition, astronomers also observe stars that appear to circle an invisible pair. The pair star can be a star so faint that it is unobservable or a black hole.

So, in pairs of normal stars and invisible stars, there is a flow of matter from normal stars to invisible stars. The material seems to be being pulled by an invisible pair, and moving in a spiral orbit toward the invisible star. The closer they get, the faster the material moves and eventually gets hotter and emits X-rays.

The invisible star is none other than a black hole.

So astronomers can identify black holes from the flow of matter that falls into the black hole. What if the black hole had no matter and no X-rays?

This is what a collaborative team of astronomers dubbed the Black Hole Police did.

Passive Black Hole

Known as the Black Hole Police, the team is well known for their usual denial of the discovery of black holes.

This time, instead of denying the existence of a black hole, the team found a black hole for the first time. Not only that, the black hole is passive or does not have any interaction with the surrounding environment.

The new black hole is codenamed VFTS 243. A black hole in a double star system in the Milky Way’s neighboring dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This black hole is paired with a blue star with a mass 25 solar masses. The blue star is class star O, which has a mass of more than 16 solar masses and a temperature of more than 30,000 K. Meanwhile, the black hole surrounding this blue star has a mass of 9 solar masses.

Interestingly, the predecessor star that ended up as a black hole also ended up without a trace of the stellar explosion we know as a supernova. So, a stellar mass black hole is the end product of a massive star that collapses at the end of its life and explodes as a supernova. The center of the remaining star is what then collapses into a black hole.

In this double star system, the remaining black holes do not emit high levels of X-ray radiation. This black hole is passive. And no trace of the supernova remains. This star seems to just disappear leaving a black hole.

Apparently, the precursor star had a complete collapse and did not experience an explosion. It is this collapse that leaves the black hole VFTS 243.

Astronomers discovered black hole VFTS 243 through 6 years of instrumentation observations Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph which is installed on Very Large Telescope (VLT) THAT.

When the Black Hole Police team discovered VFTS 243, they also doubted whether it was a black hole. As usual, this team doubted the results and re-checked which confirmed the suspicion that the blue star pair object was a black hole.

Cool Facts:

The Black Hole Police isn’t just finding passive black holes in double star pairs. They also found observational evidence of a complete stellar collapse resulting in a black hole without a supernova explosion. And this evidence is crucial to the origin of black hole mergers.

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