A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the California Institute of Technology has discovered that V404 Cygni, a black hole located about 8,000 light years from Earth, is a triple hole, the first known, reports EFE.
A small star spirals around this central black hole every 6.5 days, forming a common binary system among this type of space objects.
What was surprising for researchers was finding another distant star that also orbits the hole every 70,000 years. The discovery is described this Wednesday in the magazine Nature and Its existence questions the origin of black holes.
Until now, black holes were considered to be the result of a process known as a supernova, in which a dying star explodes violently, releasing a large amount of energy and light that ends up becoming an invisible black hole.
The researchers consider that For two stars to orbit around the triple black hole, it had to have been formed by a softer process in which a star would have collapsed in on itself without a big explosion disturbing other objects.
“Most black holes form from violent explosions of stars, but this could be the first evidence of a black hole that formed from a gentler process and prompts us to think that there may be other triples,” says Kevin Burdge, a physics researcher at MIT.
A chance find
The discovery of the triple black hole occurred almost by chance while physicists were studying Aladin Lite, a repository of astronomical observations from different space telescopes, reports EFE.
Searching for new black holes in the Milky Way, the researchers saw that V404 Cygni, a hole discovered in 1992 and since then the most studied (1,300 articles have been published about it), had two spots of light close to each other.
The first ‘spot’ corresponded to what other researchers determined was the black hole itself, with a star orbiting so close to it that it sheds some of its matter onto the black hole and illuminates it. The second ‘spot’ of light had not been investigated and corresponds to a very distant star, which also orbits V404 Cygni.
“The fact that we can see two stars so far apart means that the stars have to be really very far away,” says Burdge in statements captured by EFEensuring that the outer star is 3,500 times further from the black hole than the Earth is from the Sun, the equivalent of 100 times the distance between Pluto and the Sun.
To find out if the outer star was related to the black hole and its inner star, researchers turned to Gaiaa satellite that has accurately tracked the movements of all the stars in the galaxy since 2014.
The result was that the stars moved in tandem: “These are two stars that follow each other, linked by the weak rope of gravity generated by the black hole. It has to be a triple system,” the researcher emphasizes.
Burdge and his colleagues explain the formation of the triple black hole with this comparison: “If you pull hard on the string of a kite, the fabric breaks and you end up losing the kite, but if you pick it up with gentler movements you will keep the kite.”
The researchers simulated supernova collapse scenarios, and saw that this triple system could have been the result of a moderate explosion.
The study of the outer star, in the process of becoming a red giant star, has also revealed the age of the system: 4,000 million years.
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