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Earth’s purported ‘nearest black hole’ isn’t a black hole

It is a missing link in binary star evolution,” says astrophysicist Maxwell Moe of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who was also not part of the new study.

by TheStrangeTales
June 11, 2022
in Featured, Science
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Earth’s purported ‘nearest black hole’ isn’t a black hole

PHOTO: The star system HR 6819 (ilustrated)

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The nearest black hole to Earth isn’t a black hole at all. Instead, what scientists thought was a stellar triplet — two stars and a black hole — is actually a pair of stars caught in a unique stage of evolution.

In May 2020, a team of astronomers reported that the star system HR 6819 was probably made up of a bright, massive star locked in a tight, 40-day orbit with a nonfeeding, invisible black hole plus a second star orbiting farther away. At about 1,000 light-years from Earth, that would make this black hole the nearest to us (SN: 5/6/20). But over the following months, other teams analyzed the same data and came to a different conclusion: The system hosts only two stars and no black hole.

Now, the original team and one of the follow-up teams have joined forces and looked at HR 6819 with more powerful telescopes that collect a different type of data. The new data can make out finer details on the sky, allowing the astronomers to definitively see how many objects are in the system and what type of objects they are, the teams report in the March Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“Ultimately, it was the binary system that best explains everything,” says astronomer Abigail Frost of KU Leuven in Belgium.

Previous observations of HR 6819 showed it as a unit, so astronomers couldn’t differentiate the objects in the system nor their masses. To nail down HR 6819’s true nature, Frost and colleagues turned to the Very Large Telescope Array, a network of four interconnected telescopes in Chile that can essentially see the separate stars.

“It allowed us to disentangle that original signal definitively, which is really important to determine how many stars were in it, and whether one of them was a black hole,” Frost says.

The scientists think one of the stars is a massive bright blue star that has been siphoning material from its companion star’s bloated atmosphere. That companion star now has little gaseous atmosphere left. “It’s already gone through its main life, but because the outside has been stripped off, and you only see the exposed core, it has similar temperature and luminosity and radius to a young star,” says Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. El-Badry was not involved in the new study, but he suggested in 2021 that HR 6819 is a binary system.

This siphoned star’s core color and brightness could fool astronomers looking at the older data into thinking it was a young star with 10 times as much mass. It originally appeared as though this star was orbiting something massive but invisible — a black hole.

Once the researchers unraveled the system’s details, they realized this system is a unique one, showing astronomers a phase not seen before among systems with massive stars. “It is a missing link in binary star evolution,” says astrophysicist Maxwell Moe of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who was also not part of the new study.

Astronomers for years have seen binary systems where one star is actively pulling gas off the other, and they’ve seen systems where the donor star is just a naked stellar core. But in HR 6819, the donor star has stopped giving mass to the other. “It still has a little bit of envelope left but is quickly contracting, evolving to become a remnant core,” Moe says.

Frost and her colleagues are using the Very Large Telescope Array to monitor HR 6819 over a year to track precisely how the stars are moving. “We want to really understand how the individual stars in the system are ticking,” she says. The team will then use that information in computer simulations of binary star evolution. “[It’s] exciting to now have a system that we can use as kind of a cornerstone to investigate this in more detail,” Frost says.

Even though HR 6819 doesn’t have the nearest black hole to Earth, it appears to have something more useful to astronomers.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at [email protected]

Citations

A. J. Frost et al. HR 6819 is a binary system with no black hole — Revisiting the source with infrared interferometry and optical integral field spectroscopy. Astronomy & Astrophysics. Vol. 659, March 2022, L3. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202143004.

T. Rivinius et al. A naked-eye triple system with a nonaccreting black hole in the inner binary. Astronomy & Astrophysics. Vol. 637, May 2020, L3. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202038020.

J. Bodensteiner et al. Is HR 6819 a triple system containing a black hole? An alternative explanation. Astronomy & Astrophysics. Vol. 641, September 2020, A43. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202038682.

K. El-Badry and E. Quataert. A stripped-companion origin for Be stars: clues from the putative black holes HR 6819 and LB-1. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Vol. 502, April 2021, p. 3436. doi: 10.1093/mnras/stab285.

T Jayasinghe et al. A unicorn in Monoceros: The 3 M⊙ dark companion to the bright, nearby red giant V723 Mon is a non-interacting, mass-gap black hole candidate. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Vol. 504, June 2021, p. 2577. doi: 10.1093/mnras/stab907.

__________________

Black Hole

A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing — no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light — can escape from it.[2] The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole.[3][4] The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. Although it has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, it has no locally detectable features according to general relativity.[5] In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light.[6][7] Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.

Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace.[8] In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole. David Finkelstein, in 1958, first published the interpretation of “black hole” as a region of space from which nothing can escape. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality. The first black hole known was Cygnus X-1, identified by several researchers independently in 1971.[9][10]

Black holes of stellar mass form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses (M☉) may form by absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes. There is consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centres of most galaxies.

The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Any matter that falls onto a black hole can form an external accretion disk heated by friction, forming quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe. Stars passing too close to a supermassive black hole can be shredded into streamers that shine very brightly before being “swallowed.”[11] If other stars are orbiting a black hole, their orbits can determine the black hole’s mass and location. Such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary systems and established that the radio source known as Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses.

On 11 February 2016, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, representing the first observation of a black hole merger.[12] On 10 April 2019, the first direct image of a black hole and its vicinity was published, following observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017 of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87‘s galactic centre.[13][14][15] As of 2021, the nearest known body thought to be a black hole is around 1,500 light-years (460 parsecs) away (see List of nearest black holes). Though only a couple dozen black holes have been found so far in the Milky Way, there are thought to be hundreds of millions, most of which are solitary and do not cause emission of radiation.[16] Therefore, they would only be detectable by gravitational lensing. /Wikipedia/

Source: sciencenews.org
Tags: binary systemblack holeHR 6819University of Arizona
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