Figure LB-1: Accretion of gas onto a stellar black hole from its blue companion star, through a truncated accretion disk (artist impression). Credit: YuJjingchuan, Beijing Planetarium, 2019.
Maunakea, Hawaii – Our Milky Way Galaxy is estimated
to contain 100 million stellar black holes – cosmic bodies formed by
the collapse of massive stars and so dense even light can’t escape.
Until now, scientists had estimated the mass of an individual stellar
black hole in our Galaxy at no more than 20 times that of the Sun. But
the discovery of a huge black hole by a Chinese-led team of
international scientists has toppled that assumption.
The team, headed by Prof. LIU Jifeng of the National Astronomical
Observatory of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), spotted a
stellar black hole with a mass 70 times greater than the Sun.
The monster black hole is located 15 thousand light-years from Earth and has been named LB-1 by the researchers. The discovery is reported in today’s issue of Nature.
The discovery came as a big surprise.
“Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our Galaxy,
according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” said
Prof. LIU. “We thought that very massive stars with the chemical
composition typical of our Galaxy must shed most of their gas in
powerful stellar winds, as they approach the end of their life.
Therefore, they should not leave behind such a massive remnant. LB-1 is
twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to
take up the challenge of explaining its formation.”
Until just a few years ago, stellar black holes could only be
discovered when they gobbled up gas from a companion star. This process
creates powerful X-ray emissions, detectable from Earth, that reveal the
presence of the collapsed object.
The vast majority of stellar black holes in our Galaxy are not
engaged in a cosmic banquet, though, and thus don’t emit revealing
X-rays. As a result, only about two dozen Galactic stellar black holes
have been well identified and measured.
To counter this limitation, Prof. LIU and collaborators surveyed the
sky with China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic
Telescope (LAMOST), looking for stars that orbit an invisible object,
pulled by its gravity.
This observational technique was first proposed by the visionary
English scientist John Michell in 1783, but it has only become feasible
with recent technological improvements in telescopes and detectors.
Still, such a search is like looking for the proverbial needle in a
haystack: only one star in a thousand may be circling a black hole.
After the initial discovery, the world’s largest optical telescopes –
Spain’s 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias and W. M. Keck Observatory’s
10-m Keck I telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii – were used to determine the
system’s physical parameters. The results were nothing short of
fantastic: a star eight times heavier than the Sun was seen orbiting a
70-solar-mass black hole, every 79 days.
The discovery of LB-1 fits nicely with another breakthrough in
astrophysics. Recently, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo gravitational wave detectors have begun to
catch ripples in spacetime caused by collisions of black holes in
distant galaxies. Intriguingly, the black holes involved in such
collisions are also much bigger than what was previously considered
typical.
The direct sighting of LB-1 proves that this population of
over-massive stellar black holes exists even in our own backyard. “This
discovery forces us to re-examine our models of how stellar-mass black
holes form,” said LIGO Director Prof. David Reitze from the University
of Florida in the U.S.
“This remarkable result along with the LIGO-Virgo detections of
binary black hole collisions during the past four years really points
towards a renaissance in our understanding of black hole astrophysics,”
said Reitze.
This work was made possible by LAMOST (Xinglong, China), the Gran
Telescopio Canarias (Canary Islands, Spain), the W. M. Keck Observatory
(Hawaii, United States), and the Chandra X-ray Observatory (United
States). The research team comprised scientists from China, the United
States, Spain, Australia, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands.
By: Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters
Media Contact:
XU Ang, annxu@nao.cas.cn
About W. M. Keck Observatory
The W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes are among the most scientifically productive on Earth. The two, 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Maunakea on the Island of Hawaii feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectrometers, and world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics systems.
The W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes are among the most scientifically productive on Earth. The two, 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Maunakea on the Island of Hawaii feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectrometers, and world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics systems.
Some of the data presented herein were obtained at Keck Observatory,
which is a private 501(c) 3 non-profit organization operated as a
scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the
University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous
financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation.
The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the Native Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.
