Washington: Astronomers have been spotted in a Galaxy adjacent to us Galaxy Are they calling a cosmic “needle in a haystack” – a black hole Which is not only classified as dormant, but also appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star.
Researchers said on Monday that it is different from all other known black holes in that it “x-ray cool“—not emitting powerful X-ray radiation, which with its strong gravitational pull is indicated to have swallowed nearby material—and it was not born in a stellar explosion called a supernova.
Black holes are exceptionally dense objects with gravity so intense that not even light can escape.
It was found to have a mass at least nine times that of our Sun. tarantula nebula The Giant Magellanic Cloud is located in the region of the Milky Way and about 160,000 light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance that light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
An extremely bright and hot blue star, with a mass about 25 times that of the Sun, orbits in a stellar marriage with this black hole. This so called binary system is named VFTS 243. Researchers believe that the companion star will also eventually become a black hole and may merge with another.
Dormant black holes, which are considered relatively common, are difficult to detect because they interact very little with their surroundings. Many previously proposed candidates have been rejected with further study uncovered by team members.
“The challenge is finding those objects,” said Tomar Schner, Research Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “We identified the needle in the haystack.”
“This is the first object of its kind after being discovered by astronomers for decades,” said study co-author Karim al-Badri, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The researchers used six years of observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
There are different categories of black holes. The smallest, like the newly discovered ones, are so-called stellar-mass black holes that form from the collapse of massive individual stars at the end of their life cycles. Along with the intermediate-mass black holes that reside at the center of most galaxies, there are also giant supermassive black holes.
“Black holes are intrinsically dark objects. They don’t emit any light. Therefore, to detect black holes, we usually look at binary systems in which we place a bright star around another object. Let’s look around, which has not been detected.” Study co-author Julia Bodensteiner, a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Munich.
It is generally believed that the collapse of massive stars into black holes is associated with a powerful supernova explosion. In this case, a star perhaps 20 times the mass of our Sun blew some of its material into space, and then collapsed into itself without an explosion.
The size of its orbit with that of its companion provides evidence for the lack of an explosion.
“The system’s orbit is almost perfectly circular,” Schner said.
Schner postulated that if there were a supernova, the force of the explosion would have kicked the newly formed black hole in a random direction and attained an elliptical rather than circular orbit.
Black holes can be mercilessly violent, seeing any material – gas, dust and stars – wandering within their gravitational pull.
Bodensteiner said, “Black holes can only be ruthlessly raging if they have something they can eat. Typically, we detect them if they’re getting material from a companion star, a process called We call it accretion.”
Shener continued, “In so-called dormant black hole systems, the companion is far enough away that material does not accumulate around the black hole and emits X-rays. Instead, it is immediately swallowed by the black hole.”