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> ’Closest black hole’ system found to contain no black hole

Original explanation https://phys.org/news/2020-05-astronomers-closest-black-hole-earth.html
New explanation https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2020/09/aa38682-20.pdf

“the best explanation for the data they had, obtained with the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope, was that HR 6819 was a triple system, with one star orbiting a black hole every 40 days and a second star in a much wider orbit. … HR 6819 could also be a system with only two stars on a 40-day orbit and no black hole at all. This alternative scenario would require one of the stars to be “stripped,” meaning that, at an earlier time, it had lost a large fraction of its mass to the other star.

“We had reached the limit of the existing data, so we had to turn to a different observational strategy to decide between the two scenarios proposed by the two teams. ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). The VLTI was the only facility that would give us the decisive data we needed to distinguish between the two explanations. The astronomers used both the VLTI’s GRAVITY instrument and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s VLT.”

Nice work.