Way out in the constellation of El Dorado , on the outskirts of our galaxy, a team of astronomers has discovered a completely inactive small stellar-mass black hole without a doubt (it is the first time that we have been able to detect an inactive hole outside the limits of the universe). of the Milky Way).
Black hole VFTS 243
The object in question is not so far from the Milky Way, as it is located within a satellite galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud, but this discovery could help us find more black holes of this type in the future, and its finding also has implications for our understanding of black hole formation.
“For the first time, our team came together to report the discovery of a black hole, instead of rejecting one,” says study leader Tomer Shenar , recalling that his team of experts has been recognized for previously discrediting several associated discoveries. with black holes.
Its detection was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “We identified a ‘needle in a haystack,'” says Shenar. Although other similar black hole candidates have been proposed, the team claims that this is the first “dormant” stellar-mass black hole to be unambiguously detected outside our galaxy.
It has not been easy
Dormant black holes are particularly difficult to detect as they don’t interact much with their surroundings. “For more than two years, we have been looking for these kinds of binary black hole systems,” said Julia Bodensteiner, a researcher at ESO in Germany and a co-author of the study published in Nature Astronomy. “I was very excited when I heard about VFTS 243, which in my opinion is the most compelling candidate reported to date.”
To find VFTS 243, the collaboration searched for nearly 1,000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, specifically looking for those that might have black holes as companions.
The newly discovered black hole is at least 9 times the mass of the Sun and orbits a hot blue star that weighs 25 times the mass of the Sun. Known as VFTS 243, TIC 277299822 and 2MASS J05380840-6909190, this binary system lies about 160 000 light years away in the constellation of Dorado. It resides within the Tarantula Nebula, the most spectacular feature of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
Astronomers believe that a stellar-mass black hole forms when the core of a dying massive star collapses , but it remains unclear whether or not this is accompanied by a powerful supernova explosion. The star that gave rise to VFTS 243 appears to have completely collapsed, leaving no trace of a powerful supernova explosion.
References: Tomer Shenar, Hugues Sana, Laurent Mahy, Kareem El-Badry, Pablo Marchant, Norbert Langer, Calum Hawcroft, Matthias Fabry, Koushik Sen, Leonardo A. Almeida, Michael Abdul-Masih, Julia Bodensteiner, Paul A. Crowther, Mark Gieles, Mariusz Gromadzki, Vincent Hénault-Brunet, Artemio Herrero, Alex de Koter, Patryk Iwanek, Szymon Kozłowski, Daniel J. Lennon, Jesús Maíz Apellániz, Przemysław Mróz, Anthony FJ Moffat, Annachiara Picco, Paweł Pietrukowicz, Radosław Poleski, Krzysztof Rybicki , Fabian RN Schneider, Dorota M. Skowron, Jan Skowron, Igor Soszyński, Michał K. Szymański, Silvia Toonen, Andrzej Udalski, Krzysztof Ulaczyk, Jorick S. Vink, Marcin Wrona. An X-ray-quiet black hole born with a negligible kick in a massive binary within the Large Magellanic Cloud. Nature Astronomy, 2022; DOI: 10.1038 / s41550-022-01730-y
