The stellar black holes arise from the collapse of the massive stars and in the Milky Way it is estimated that there are about one hundred million, but the recent discovery of one with a mass far superior to what was believed possible threw some assumptions on these objects and Your training
The discovery of the black hole LB-1 appears on Wednesday published in a study of the journal Nature, in which scientists from Spain, China, the United States, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands collaborated.
The Gran Telescopio Canarias, located on the Spanish island of La Palma, was one of those responsible for studying the black hole located 15,000 light years from Earth to establish its characteristics.
Until now, scientists had estimated that the mass of a stellar black hole in our galaxy was no more than 20 times that of the Sun, but the discovery of this huge stellar object shattered that assumption.
And the mass of this stellar black hole is 70 times greater than that of our sun, a discovery that caused great surprise.
“Black holes of a mass like this should not exist in our galaxy, according to most current models of stellar evolution,“ said Professor Liu Jifeng of the National Astronomical Observatory of China and study leader.
Astronomers believe that very massive stars with the typical composition of the Milky Way should release most of their gases, in the form of powerful stellar winds, as they approach the end of their life ” and should not leave behind such a massive remnant , ”said Liu, referring to the black hole.
But LB-1 is twice as massive as previously thought would be possible and “now theorists will have to take on the challenge of explaining their training,” said the expert in a statement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Until a few years ago, stellar black holes could only be located when swallowing gas from a companion star, a process that creates powerful X-ray emissions that can be detected from Earth and reveal its existence.
But as the vast majority of this type of stellar black holes do not usually swallow the gas of other stars, they do not emit that signal, so until now only about two dozen were well identified and measured.
To try to deal with this limitation, the scientific team studied the sky with the Chinese LAMOST telescope hunting for stars that orbit an invisible object, although it was almost to find a needle in a haystack, but they found it.
Once the first discovery was made, the world’s largest telescopes, the Grand Canary Telescope (GTC), 10.4 meters in diameter, and the Keck I in the United States, 10 meters, were used to determine the physical parameters of the system .
The results were “fantastic” because the system consists of a star eight times heavier than the Sun, which every 79 days orbits a black hole 70 times the mass of our star.
This discovery, scientists recall, “fits perfectly” with another breakthrough in astrophysics: recently the gravitational wave detectors Ligo (USA) and Virgo (Italy) began to capture space-time waves caused by black hole collisions in distant galaxies.
Curiously, the note indicates, those black holes are much larger than what was considered typical and the discovery of LB-1 proves that this type of holes exists even in our galaxy.
“This discovery forces us to re-examine our models of how black holes of star mass form,” said LIGO director David Reitze.
“This remarkable result, along with the detection made in the last four years, by Ligo and Virgo of black hole binary collisions really point to a revival of our understanding of black hole astrophysics,” he added.
Source: Elcomercio
