The discovery of a black hole that is 12 times the mass of the sun is detailed in a new Astrophysical Journal research submission.
The Pei-Ling Chan Endowed Chair in the Department of Physics at the University of Alabama System says that it is close to the sun. It's in our backyard.
Black holes are seen as exotic because they can't be seen in the same way as visible stars because of their gravity.
Dr. Chakrabarti says that black holes at the center of galaxies can drive evolution.
It's not known how the black holes affect the dynamics of the universe. They may affect the formation of our galaxy if they are many.
The black hole was found by analyzing data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite mission.
She says that they searched for objects that could be attributed to a single star. You have a good reason to believe that the companion is not normal.
The Automated Planet Finder in California, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile were some of the telescopes used to measure the stars.
The pull of the black hole on the visible sun-like star can be determined from these spectroscopic measurements. A shift in the frequencies of waves in relation to an observer is called a "doppler shift"
She says that by analyzing the line-of-sight velocities of the visible star, and this visible star is akin to our own sun, we can infer how big the black hole companion is. The Gaia solution indicated that the system is composed of a visible star that is in close proximity to a large object.
The black hole doesn't interact with the star, so it has to be inferred from the motions of the star. Black holes that don't interact with another object usually don't have a ring of accretion dust and material with them. More of the interacting type have been found due to Accretion.
The majority of black holes are bright in X-rays due to some interaction with the black hole. The stuff from the other star can be seen in X-rays.
She says these systems tend to be on a short period of time. "We're looking at a monster black hole, but it's on a long period of time, about half a year." It's far away from the star and not making any advances towards it.
The techniques used by the scientists should be applied to other non acting systems.
"This is a new population that we're just starting to learn about and will tell us about the formation channel of black holes, so it's been very exciting to work on this," says Peter Craig, a graduate student at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Estimates show that there are about a million visible stars with black holes. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack because there are so many stars. The search was made simpler by narrowing it down.
Scientists are trying to figure out how black holes form.
Black holes around stars are a new type of population and there are many different routes that have been proposed. It will likely take us some time to understand their demographic, how they form, and how these channels are different from the more well-known population of interacting black holes.
More information: A non-interacting Galactic black hole candidate in a binary system with a main-sequence star, arXiv:2210.05003v1 [astro-ph.GA] arxiv.org/abs/2210.05003 Journal information: Astrophysical Journal
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