[NTDBeijingJuly192022]An international team of experts known for overturning black hole discoveries has discovered a dormant stellar black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, even though there are billions of dormant black holes in nearly every galaxy. , but this is the first black hole to be detected outside the Milky Way.
The research was published Monday (July 18) in the journal Nature Astronomy. Tomer Shenar, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and lead author of the new study, described the discovery in a statement: “We’ve got a needle in the ocean.”
Schener and his colleagues discovered a stellar black hole, about nine times the mass of the Sun, in the Tarantula Nebula, a star-forming region of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). .
The black hole orbits a blue giant star with a mass equivalent to 25 suns, forming a binary star system named VFTS 243.
The team has consistently worked to disprove the existence of potential black holes, rather than confirm them, earning the team the playful nickname of the “black hole police,” the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Kareem El-Badry, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, has been dubbed “the black hole buster” by Scheiner.
“This is the first time that our team has come together to report the discovery of a black hole, rather than dismissing one,” Schener said.
“When Scheiner asked me to double-check his findings, I was skeptical,” Elbadley said, “but I couldn’t find a plausible explanation for the data that didn’t involve black holes.”
Stellar black holes are formed when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity. In binary systems, where two stars orbit each other, a star collapses leaving a black hole in orbit with a glowing companion star.
A black hole is “dormant” if it doesn’t emit high levels of X-ray radiation, as is the case with the black hole in VFTS 243. However, the team found that the star that produced the black hole disappeared without any sign of a powerful explosion.
“The black hole-forming star in VFTS 243 appears to have collapsed completely, with no sign of a big bang,” Schener said. “Evidence for this ‘direct collapse’ has been found recently, but our study arguably provides One of the most direct indications. This has huge implications for the origin of black hole mergers in the universe.”
The team pored over six years of data collected, using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile to detect 1,000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud .
“We have been searching for such a black hole binary system for more than two years,” said Julia Bodensteiner, a researcher at the German ESA and co-author of the study. “When I heard about VFTS 243, I was very excited. In my opinion, it is the most convincing candidate reported so far.”
Despite the moniker “Black Hole Police,” the team actively encourages scrutiny and hopes their work will lead to the discovery of other stellar black holes orbiting massive stars, with thousands estimated to exist in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds.
“Of course, I hope that others in the field will take a closer look at our analysis and try to make alternative models,” Elbadley said. “It’s a very exciting project.”
(Comprehensive report by reporter Li Zhaoxi/responsible editor: Lin Qing)
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