![]() The skepticism was shared by co-author Kareem El-Badry of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in the USA, whom Shenar calls the “black hole destroyer”. “ As a researcher who has debunked potential black holes in recent years, I was extremely skeptical regarding this discovery,” says Shenar. Identifying these companions as black holes is extremely difficult, as so many alternative possibilities exist. ![]() To find VFTS 243, the collaboration searched nearly 1000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, looking for the ones that could have black holes as companions. “ I was very excited when I heard about VFTS 243, which in my opinion is the most convincing candidate reported to date.” “ For more than two years now, we have been looking for such black-hole-binary systems,” says co-author Julia Bodensteiner, a research fellow at ESO in Germany. The newly found black hole is at least nine times the mass of our Sun, and orbits a hot, blue star weighing 25 times the Sun’s mass.ĭormant black holes are particularly hard to spot since they do not interact much with their surroundings. ![]() “ It is incredible that we hardly know of any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe them to be”, explains co-author Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven. The black hole is ‘dormant’ if it does not emit high levels of X-ray radiation, which is how such black holes are typically detected. In a binary, a system of two stars revolving around each other, this process leaves behind a black hole in orbit with a luminous companion star. Stellar-mass black holes are formed when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity. Though other similar black hole candidates have been proposed, the team claims this is the first ‘dormant’ stellar-mass black hole to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy. “ We identified a ‘needle in a haystack’,” says Shenar who started the study at KU Leuven in Belgium and is now a Marie-Curie Fellow at Amsterdam University, the Netherlands. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT). Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. "For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one," says study leader Tomer Shenar. A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |