A team of astrophysicists known to disprove the alleged previous black holes on Monday announced a discovery of their own: the first black hole of “latent” stellar mass detected orbiting a star in a nearby galaxy.
Although these black holes are believed to be common throughout the universe, they have proved difficult to find and they themselves have rejected several possible candidates in recent years.
The team was looking at the sky for something that could eventually turn into a binary black hole, in which two black holes orbit each other after swallowing their stars in a supernova explosion.
They believe that the blue star, which is in the galaxy of the Large Magellanic Cloud coming to our Milky Way, is locked in a dance of death with a black hole that has nine times the mass of our Sun.
But this binary system, known as VFTS 243, is called latent because it does not emit X-rays: it is not close enough to suck matter from its star.
Hugues Sana, an astrophysicist at KU Leuven University in Belgium, said the Milky Way alone is believed to have about 100 million black holes of stellar mass, which are much smaller than its large supermassive siblings.
This could be because many are latent, waiting for their moment to finally swallow their accompanying star.
“We have never detected these systems before,” Shenar told AFP. “There have been some claims in recent years, but all have been more or less refuted,” Shenar told AFP.
That’s why Shenar said they were expecting additional scrutiny.
Then they called the most famous black hole debunker they knew.
“I sent him the data and I told him, listen, we found this object; it proves I was wrong,” Tomer said.
“But I couldn’t find a plausible explanation for the data not involving a black hole.”
The discovery could also give an insight into how black holes form.
The force of the explosion causes the black holes in a binary system to be an elliptical orbit instead of a circular one.
“That means the star immediately disappeared into the black hole,” Shenar said.
Andrew Norton, an astrophysicist at the British Open University who did not take part in the study, said “this is important evidence that all of these stars may not end their lives in supernova explosions”.
“If someone comes and discredits that too, I’m sure they’ll have a pretty fantastic explanation, like the fat alien.”
…
Originally published as the first “latent” stellar black hole discovered by the denial team