Black hole research always has something new to offer.
The theory of general relativity was explained in a book by Albert Einstein. Astronomers took pictures of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way one hundred years ago. The first "dormant" black hole is described in a recent paper.
Black holes are the most dense objects in the Universe. Black holes that are not emitting light. They are hard to find. The discovery gives insight into the formation and evolution of black holes. This information is important to understand the events of the universe.
VFTS 243 is a system made up of two objects that are in close proximity to each other. The first object is a blue star with 25 times the mass of the Sun, and the second is a black hole nine times larger than the Sun. VFTS 243 is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud and is located about 163,000 light years away from Earth.
The black hole in VFTS 243 doesn't emit any radiation. Strong X-rays are not detected from the black hole in this system.
The star is 200,000 times larger than the black hole and has a diameter of 53 miles. The two are rotating around a center of mass. The system looks like a single blue dot even with the most powerful telescopes.
There are hundreds of such systems with black holes that don't emit X-rays. When black holes are stripping matter from a companion star, it's easy to see.
Feeding causes a disk of gas and dust. The accretion disk is heated to millions of degrees when the material falls inward. There is a lot of X-rays coming from these hot disks of matter. The Cygnus X-1 system is the first to be detected in this way.
The team was able to determine which was true using a technique calledspectral disentangling. This technique separates VFTS 243 light from VFTS 243 light, which is similar to what happens when white light enters a prism and different colors are created.
AdvertisementThe light from VFTS 243 came from a single source. The only conclusion that could be reached was that the second body is a black hole and thus the first one outside of the Milky Way.
Black holes with a mass of less than 100 Suns are formed when a star collapses. There is a huge explosion when this occurs.
The fact that the black hole in VFTS 243 is in a circular path with the star supports the idea that there was no explosion. The progenitor star collapsed to create the black hole.
A blink of an eye shows that the star in VFTS 243 will live for 5 million years. VFTS 243 should become a black hole after the star's death.
Astronomers have found nearly 100 events where black holes merged. VFTS 243 and similar yet-to-be-discovered systems are crucial to future research because they are still unknown. Nature has a sense of humor because black holes illuminate our understanding of the Universe.
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