Theorists think there may be 100 million star-size black holes in the Milky Way, but they don't know if they are. Researchers say they have found a black hole that is quiet and doesn't put on a show. Researchers will be able to understand the lives and deaths of the stars that produce them if they use the technique to get a better handle on the population of hidden black holes.
Black hole discovery claims have been demolished by the researchers. They have their own and they think it's strong. Tomer Shenar is the leader of the study. This is the first unambiguous black hole.
The motion to and from Earth is stretched when a star is tugged by a companion. Astronomers can determine the mass of something if they look for periodic shifts in the star's spectrum. Dozens of exoplanets have been detected with hundreds more waiting to be confirmed. Shenar says it's not hard to find radial velocities. It's hard to prove it's a black hole.
The companion must be either a star or a black hole if it's 2.2 times bigger than the Sun. The light of a pair of stars blurs together at a distance, making it difficult to distinguish between them. Shenar and his colleagues developed a technique that adjusts the spectrum of two hypothetical stars until they match the observations. At the end of the process, if there is no light coming from one of the stars, it is a black hole.
The technique has been used by the team over the past few years. Shenar says that both LB-1 and HR 6819 are probably not real. Papers have been cast doubt on all the proposed black holes, according to him.
Shenar's team now has a detection of its own. Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the researchers looked over the course of six years for radial velocities in nearly 1000 massive stars in the Largeic Cloud. VFTS 243 is a star that is 25 Suns in size and seems to travel every 10 days. The team reported today in Nature Astronomy that the companion is so large and dark that it could be a black hole.
Shenar sent the data to a black hole debunker, but he couldn't find a better explanation of the data. Benjamin Giesers was a black hole hunter and astronomer at the University of Gttingen.
A dying giant star explodes and much of it's material collapses into a black hole. There was no evidence of a blast. It is possible that the star's onetime companion could have collapsed into a black hole without exploding.
Black hole mergers can be harder to detect with the help of supernova explosions. Astronomers might look forward to more merger events if stars can form black holes. There aren't many clues that stars can collapse without an explosion. This is an empirical piece of evidence.
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