‘Black hole police’ uncover a dormant black hole outside the Milky Way

Is this the wormhole where all the evil dimension stuff comes out of…. or are we the evil dimension stuff that’s gonna come out on the other side.

TL;DR

An international team of astronomers, including Kareem El-Badry, known for debunking black hole discoveries, has identified a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The black hole, VFTS 243, orbits a massive blue star and was found after six years of data collection from the Very Large Telescope. Dormant black holes are rare, as they don’t emit radiation like typical black holes. This discovery offers key insights into how black holes form, especially in the case of a “direct collapse” without an accompanying explosion.

After reading the article, a user named Harry gained more than 111 upvotes with this comment: “It’s all fun and games until we discover a black hole shooting right into our solar system. Forget asteroids. That will be the most terrifying collision ever.” Don’t forget to discuss this incredible find and your thoughts below in the comment section!
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An international team of experts known for debunking black hole discoveries has identified a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way. Among the team members is Kareem El-Badry from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), who has been nicknamed the “black hole destroyer” by his peers.

“For the first time, our team is reporting a black hole discovery rather than rejecting one,” says study leader Tomer Shenar, a Marie-Curie Fellow at Amsterdam University.

The researchers discovered that the star which led to the formation of the black hole disappeared without showing signs of a massive explosion.

“We found a needle in a haystack,” Shenar remarked. Although similar black hole candidates have been suggested before, the team claims this is the first clearly detected “dormant” stellar-mass black hole outside the Milky Way. Their research was published in Nature Astronomy.

Stellar-mass black holes arise when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives. In a binary star system, this results in a black hole orbiting a bright companion star. A black hole is considered “dormant” if it does not emit significant X-ray radiation, which is how black holes are often identified.

This discovery was made possible by six years of data from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT).

“It’s amazing how few dormant black holes we know of, considering how common astronomers think they are,” explains co-author Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven. The newly discovered black hole is at least nine times the mass of the Sun and orbits a hot, blue star 25 times the Sun’s mass.

Dormant black holes are especially difficult to detect since they don’t interact much with their surroundings.

“For over two years, we’ve been searching for these black-hole-binary systems,” says Julia Bodensteiner, a co-author and research fellow at ESO in Germany. “I was thrilled when I learned about VFTS 243, which I believe is the most convincing candidate we’ve found so far.”

Glowing brightly about 160 000 light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula is the most spectacular feature of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. This image from VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile shows the region and its rich surroundings in great detail. It reveals a cosmic landscape of star clusters, glowing gas clouds and the scattered remains of supernova explosions. Credit: Credit: ESO

To locate VFTS 243, the team analyzed nearly 1,000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud, searching for those that might have black hole companions. Identifying such companions as black holes is notoriously challenging, as there are many other potential explanations.

“As someone who has disproved several black hole candidates, I was very skeptical about this finding,” Shenar admits.

El-Badry, who shares this skepticism, was asked by Shenar to double-check the findings. “When Tomer asked me to review the data, I had doubts. But I couldn’t find any explanation for the data that didn’t involve a black hole,” El-Badry states.

The discovery also provides new insights into how black holes are formed. While astronomers believe a stellar-mass black hole forms when a massive star’s core collapses, it’s still unclear if this event is always accompanied by a supernova explosion.

“The star that created the black hole in VFTS 243 seems to have collapsed entirely, with no sign of an explosion,” says Shenar. “Evidence for this ‘direct collapse’ scenario has been growing recently, but our study may provide one of the clearest indications. This has major implications for understanding how black-hole mergers occur in the universe.”

The black hole in VFTS 243 was identified using six years of observations from the FLAMES instrument on ESO’s VLT, which allows astronomers to observe over 100 objects simultaneously, saving significant telescope time.

Though known as the “black hole police,” the team welcomes critical analysis and hopes their findings will inspire the discovery of more stellar-mass black holes orbiting massive stars, potentially thousands of which may exist in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds.

“I fully expect others in the field to scrutinize our analysis and propose alternative models,” El-Badry adds. “It’s an exciting project to be a part of.”

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Paul
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Paul
1 month ago

Black holes are notoriously tough because if you have one on its lonesome and it doesn’t interact with anything (like material falling onto it), it’s really hard to detect said black hole. We have a lot of questions about how they form, and one outstanding theory is that they can happen when a very supermassive star (~18x the mass of the sun or up) reaches the end of its life. Traditionally, it’s thought that this sort of event would have a supernova explosion, but some have argued that in fact the star’s material will be swallowed by the black hole as it forms and instead “disappear.” The trouble is proving it- firstly, such events are very rare- like once a century in a galaxy rare. Second, how the heck are you supposed to see all these millions of stars in a galaxy well enough that you discover when one’s disappeared?! Keep in mind, supermassive stars at the end of their lives undergo huge amounts of mass loss and bright/dim periods, so you also have to show that this was a star flat out disappearing over just dimming (think what happened to Betelgeuse in recent years, but on steroids).

As such, people have proposed finding stars that have disappeared in the past, in optical data. What is new is in this case they found a black hole in a binary pair with a “normal” star, and normally you’d get X-ray emission from the pair as the normal star’s material feeds the black hole. However, this isn’t present here, and based on the mass of the unseen companion a black hole seems likely. Further, based on its orbital dynamics, it does NOT seem likely that a supernova explosion occurred- ie no ejecta thrown off, no “kick” from the black hole formation making the star change its orbit. This, the group argues, implies the black hole never had a supernova explosion when it first went off… though of course note that explosion would’ve happened well before observations of this binary pair, so we can’t know for sure.

Either way, the fact that a quiet black hole in an “X-ray binary” system was found is certainly very interesting!

SimonW
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SimonW
1 month ago

I’m fascinated by that term, ‘Black Hole Police’

Shaw
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Shaw
1 month ago

What are the differences n a dormant black hole and a regular black hole?

Annie
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Annie
1 month ago
Reply to  Shaw

“The black hole is “dormant” if it does not emit high levels of X-ray radiation, which is how such black holes are typically detected”- from the article

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