We report the detection of a black hole (NGC 1850 BH1) in the ∼100 Myr-old massive cluster NGC~1850 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is in a binary system with a main-sequence turn-off star (4.9 ± 0.4 M⊙), which is starting to fill its Roche Lobe and becoming distorted. Using 17 epochs of VLT/MUSE observations we detected radial velocity variations exceeding 300 km/s associated to the target star, linked to the ellipsoidal variations measured by OGLE-IV in the optical bands. Under the assumption of a semi-detached system, the simultaneous modelling of radial velocity and light curves constraints the orbital inclination of the binary to (38±2)∘, resulting in a true mass of the unseen companion of 11.1−2.4+2.1M⊙. This represents the first direct dynamical detection of a black hole in a young massive cluster, opening up the possibility of studying the initial mass function and the early dynamical evolution of such compact objects in high-density environments.
@article{arxiv.2111.06506,
title = {A black hole detected in the young massive LMC cluster NGC 1850},
author = {S. Saracino and S. Kamann and M. G. Guarcello and C. Usher and N. Bastian and I. Cabrera-Ziri and M. Gieles and S. Dreizler and G. S. Da Costa and T. -O. Husser and V. Hénault-Brunet},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.06506},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
11 pages, 8 figures, 4 Tables. Accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society