A team of international scientists spotted a stellar black hole three-and-a-half times greater than anyone thought possible.
Researchers previously estimated the mass of an individual black hole in our galaxy at no more than 20 times that of the sun.
Jifeng Liu, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, however, has proved everyone wrong.
Alongside collaborators from Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the US, Liu helped uncover a monster black hole 70 times more massive than the sun.
“Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” he said in a statement.
“We thought that very massive stars with the chemical composition typical of our galaxy must shed most of their gas in powerful stellar winds, as they approach the end of their life,” Liu explained. “Therefore, they should not leave behind such a massive remnant.”
Until recently, stellar black holes could be seen only when they gobbled up gas from a companion star, creating powerful X-ray emissions detectable from Earth.
But because the vast majority of black holes are not that hungry and don’t emit revealing X-rays, only about two dozen spacetime regions have been identified and measured.
To circumvent this problem, Liu & Co. used China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) for a needle-in-a-haystack search for stars orbiting an invisible object pulled by its gravity.
To everyone’s surprise, they found something.
Located some 15,000 light years from Earth, the so-called LB-1 black hole is more than three times as massive as expected.
“Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation,” Liu said.
Scientists used the world’s largest optical telescopes—Spain’s Gran Telescopio Canarias and the US’s Keck I—to determine the system’s physical parameters.
The results were shocking: A star eight times heavier than the sun orbits a 70-solar-mass black hole every 79 days.
“This discovery forces us to re-examine our models of how stellar-mass black holes form,” according to David Reitze, director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
“This remarkable result,” Reitze, a professor at the University of Florida, added, “really points toward a renaissance in our understanding of black hole astrophysics.”
The finding was reported in the latest issue of Nature.
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