Astronomers have found a love triangle in space
Physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have discovered something unprecedented: a triple black hole system, consisting of three bodies orbiting each other at a distance of about 7,800 light years from Earth.
Binary black holes—systems of two bodies in which at least one is a black hole—are quite common in the Universe. It is often observed that a black hole engulfs a rotating star if it gets too close to the black hole with intense gravity. But the most recent discoveries go even further, as there is a third body in the equation that shows a system with a black hole and two stars in a configuration that has never been observed before. The team’s study describing the system and its newly discovered member, public today at Nature.
“We believe that most black holes form from violent stellar explosions, but this discovery helps challenge that belief,” study co-author Kevin Burge, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement from the institute. “This system is of great interest for the evolution of black holes and raises questions about whether there will be more trios out there.”
Discovered in 1992.
We are talking about the V404 Cygni system, which contains the black hole of the same name, whose mass is nine times the mass of the Sun. It was confirmed to be a black hole in 1992 and has been studied ever since; in 2022 NASA turned the light echo of a black hole into soundswhich allows us to technically “hear” the black hole in action. black hole echo good way for scientists characterize intensive conditions that surround black holes.
Black holes are regions of space with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, which is why they are black. They are thought to form as supernovae—the brilliant deaths of stars whose remnants collapse inward to form black holes.
Until now, it was believed that V404 Cygni belongs to a binary system consisting of a black hole and a nearby star orbiting it and gradually losing its matter due to the gravitational force of the black hole. But according to the discovery, there is another star there, much further from the black hole, but part of the same system.
According to measurements, the inner star orbits the black hole in less than a week, but the outer star takes about 70,000 years, or 3.6 million weeks. The outer star is located at a distance of about 3,500 astronomical units from the black hole. An astronomical unit is equivalent to measuring the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.
This article was translated from Gizmodo US by Lucas Handley. You can find the original version here.