"Impossible black hole" may turn out to be a mistake of astronomers

"Impossible black hole" may turn out to be a mistake of astronomers
"Impossible black hole" may turn out to be a mistake of astronomers
Anonim

A few weeks ago, scientists from the National Astronomical Observatory of China discovered a black hole, which, according to all ideas about such objects, should not exist. The mass of an object called LB-1 is about 70 solar masses. “Black holes of this mass should not exist in our Galaxy, according to most modern models of stellar evolution,” one of its authors, Jifeng Liu, commented on the discovery.

However, several articles that appeared on the ArXiV.org preprint portal at once refute this discovery. The point is that light, interpreted as coming from the accretion disk of a black hole, can have a completely different source. This means that the measurement of the mass of a black hole, obtained on the basis of light radiation, is most likely wrong.

According to Chinese astronomers, LB-1 is in a binary system - a much smaller star revolves around the black hole. Due to the fact that the gravity of this star affects the black hole in a certain way, the frequency of the radiation emanating from LB-1 fluctuates. But scientists at the University of California, Berkeley argue that the H-alpha emission (one of the spectral lines of hydrogen) does not fluctuate at all.

The researchers say the wobble recorded by Chinese astronomers is an illusory effect caused by the emission and absorption of a partner star. Once these factors were removed from the analysis data, the fluctuations in the H-alpha spectral line completely disappeared. This suggests that the black hole is either much greater than 70 solar masses (which is extremely unlikely), or its mass does not exceed 20 solar masses.

Video showing the oscillation of the radiation frequency in a binary system / © Brian Jackson

Independently of the American researchers, two more teams of scientists published the refutation of the "impossible black hole" discovery. Astronomers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand have performed computer simulations of binary systems consisting of a star and a black hole, located at the same distance from Earth as LB-1. Modeling results indicate that the mass of LB-1 may well fluctuate between four and seven solar.

The third article was published by scientists from Leiden Catholic University in Belgium. They, like their American colleagues, focused on analyzing the H-alpha spectral line, using their own data obtained from the HERMES spectrograph at the Mercator telescope in the Canary Islands. Subtracting the theoretical hydrogen-alpha absorption line corresponding to the influence of the star in the binary system, the Belgian scientists came to a similar conclusion: a black hole in this system may well be less than 20 solar masses.

Although none of the articles mentioned have yet been peer reviewed, the fact that the three groups of scientists have come to different conclusions is compelling. So in LB-1 there is certainly nothing "impossible" and undermining the foundations of astrophysics.

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