An international team of researchers has detected the first binary starthat is, two stars orbiting each other near the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A. This discovery suggests that black holes are not as destructive as had been commonly believed.
The study was published this Tuesday in Nature Communications. Astronomer Florian Peissler, from the University of Cologne, lead author of the study, explained the results of the analysis of data collected by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The discovery, made by a team including scientists from Germany and the Czech Republic, also shows that binary systems can thrive for a relatively short time, even under adverse conditions such as those brought by the proximity of a black hole. It is estimated probable that the binary star, called D9, merges into a single due to the strong gravitation of the black hole.
For a long time, the scientific community thought that the environment close to a supermassive black hole prevented new stars from forming nearby, which has been refuted by the discovery of several young stars near Sagittarius A. The discovery of D9 also shows that even in the harsh conditions that exist in the vicinity of a black hole, stellar pairs can form.
The discovered binary system was found in a dense cluster of stars and other objects orbiting Sagittarius A, called cluster S. The most enigmatic thing about this cluster are the objects that They behave like stars, but look like gas clouds and dust.
While observing these objects, the researchers found a surprising pattern in D9. The data obtained with the VLT instruments revealed recurring variations in the speed of the starwhich indicated that this was actually two orbiting each other, as was proven with subsequent analysis.
Furthermore, the results may shed light on the nature of G-objects and the team of researchers has hypothesized that it is a combination of binary stars not yet merged and remaining material from already merged stars.
#binary #star #detected #supermassive #black #hole
