https://www.space.com/dormant-black-hole-discovery-beyond-milky-way
‘Needle in a haystack’ black hole discovered in neighboring galaxy
The dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the first to be confirmed outside of the Milky Way.
Scientists have spotted an example of a black hole that should be extremely common but is quite difficult to find.
dv said:
https://www.space.com/dormant-black-hole-discovery-beyond-milky-way‘Needle in a haystack’ black hole discovered in neighboring galaxy
The dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the first to be confirmed outside of the Milky Way.
Scientists have spotted an example of a black hole that should be extremely common but is quite difficult to find.
Wow!
It’s a finely made find in that patch of fuzz.
I also read this interesting piece they linked:
Seems towards the end of his life, Hawking was doubting the existence of black holes as such.
He suggested that there is no event horizon, only an “apparent horizon” which traps matter and energy before later dissolving and releasing it.
Nothing ever reaches the centre, so in effect there is no centre.
dv said:
https://www.space.com/dormant-black-hole-discovery-beyond-milky-way‘Needle in a haystack’ black hole discovered in neighboring galaxy
The dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the first to be confirmed outside of the Milky Way.
Scientists have spotted an example of a black hole that should be extremely common but is quite difficult to find.
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2210/?lang
> A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says study leader Tomer Shenar. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to six years of observations obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT).
The VLT is a great instrument for this. It’s got unprecedented accuracy for an Earth-based telescope and a small field of view which allows it to zoom in on a small field of stars. I’d been wondering what it’s been up to.
> The newly found black hole is at least nine times the mass of our Sun, and orbits a hot, blue star weighing 25 times the Sun’s mass.
Also, I would very much like to know if data from the Gaia telescope is capable of finding these. Perhaps not in the current Data release 3, but Gaia Data release 3 has already given us the biggest and best multiple star catalogue ever, so they could be in there.
> they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion.
That is truly unexpected. though perhaps it is simply old enough for any sign of explosion to have dissipated.
> To find VFTS 243, the collaboration searched nearly 1000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, looking for the ones that could have black holes as companions. Identifying these companions as black holes is extremely difficult, as so many alternative possibilities exist.
So many?
> Also, I would very much like to know if data from the Gaia telescope is capable of finding these. Perhaps not in the current Data release 3, but Gaia Data release 3 has already given us the biggest and best multiple star catalogue ever, so they could be in there.
I had a quick look at the Gaia info on multiple star systems. By far the largest contribution in the catalogue is of eclipsing binaries, which is not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for binaries by direct imaging, such as the one in the original thread.