An X-ray quiet black hole born with a negligible kick in a massive binary within the Large Magellanic Cloud
Abstract
Stellar-mass black holes are the final remnants of stars born with more than 15 solar masses. Billions are expected to reside in the Local Group, yet only few are known, mostly detected through X-rays emitted as they accrete material from a companion star. Here, we report on VFTS 243: a massive X-ray faint binary in the Large Magellanic Cloud. With an orbital period of 10.4-d, it comprises an O-type star of 25 solar masses and an unseen companion of at least nine solar masses. Our spectral analysis excludes a non-degenerate companion at a 5-sigma confidence level. The minimum companion mass implies that it is a black hole. No other X-ray quiet black hole is unambiguously known outside our Galaxy. The (near-)circular orbit and kinematics of VFTS 243 imply that the collapse of the progenitor into a black hole was associated with little or no ejected material or black-hole kick. Identifying such unique binaries substantially impacts the predicted rates of gravitational-wave detections and properties of core-collapse supernovae across the Cosmos.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2207.07675,
title = {An X-ray quiet black hole born with a negligible kick in a massive binary within the Large Magellanic Cloud},
author = {Tomer Shenar and Hugues Sana and Laurent Mahy and Kareem El-Badry and Pablo Marchant and Norbert Langer and Calum Hawcroft and Matthias Fabry and Koushik Sen and Leonardo A. Almeida and Michael Abdul-Masih and Julia Bodensteiner and Paul A. Crowther and Mark Gieles and Mariusz Gromadzki and Vincent Henault-Brunet and Artemio Herrero and Alex de Koter and Patryk Iwanek and Szymon Kozłowski and Daniel J. Lennon and Jesus Maız Apellaniz and Przemysław Mroz and Anthony F. J. Moffat and Annachiara Picco and Paweł Pietrukowicz and Radosław Poleski and Krzysztof Rybicki and Fabian R. N. Schneider and Dorota M. Skowron and Jan Skowron and Igor Soszynski and Michał K. Szymanski and Silvia Toonen and Andrzej Udalski and Krzysztof Ulaczyk and Jorick S. Vink and Marcin Wrona},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.07675},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted to Nature Astronomy, 64 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables; ESO press release: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2210/; Nat Asr paper URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01730-y