A Sun-like star orbiting a black hole
academic.oup.com
academic.oup.com
I don't speak astrophysicist but I think this part
> Common envelope evolution can only produce the system’s wide orbit under extreme and likely unphysical assumptions. Formation models involving triples or dynamical assembly in an open cluster may be more promising.
means that the black hole and star formed separately and the black hole later captured the star? Hopefully the star had no life bearing planets before that, that would have been a terrible fate.
That sounds like a decent sci fi novel idea: a civilisation racing to develop interstellar travel before a black hole grabs hold of its star and swallows its planet. How many months/years would it be from the star being captured to the planet being ripped away, I wonder? What would the experience be like for anything conscious on the planet?
I could imagine some engineer notices that some more distance probe from the star is suffering from clock skew, but nobody takes them seriously, putting it down to a fault in the circuitry: "It's old, the crystal timer is well out of spec". Then another distant probe also suffers a similar problem, and more people begin to take it seriously.
By the time they collect enough evidence that this is not by chance, other people have started to notice that stars have been vanishing behind a space in the sky. When asked why they didn't notice this sooner, there was no telescope pointed there for a while due to its position and budget cuts to the astronomy programme have limited search time.
Then the real drama begins, they know that amateurs will also notice soon enough, so they need to control the spread of information. They then need to somehow convince people who will most certainly die, along with everybody they know and love, and work towards the common goal of saving the human race.
Then some awesome science fiction around space travel that can escape black holes. Of course something will happen and the escape will be narrow, with them needing to sling-shot off the black hole or something.
I would call it something simple like "From Darkness" as not to spoil too much the story. For some reason Matthew McConaughey will be a space cowboy pilot, Amy Adams as space-travel Science officer, Matt Damon is chief potato grower and Denzel Washington has for some reason got to make a super hard decision to leave somebody behind. Samuel L Jackson will at some point get pissed off and force the launch. In a side story, Bruce Willis starts an expedition to go mine the black hole, and instantly gets noodled.
I think a better way to write the latter part of the story is that, finally, after lots of bickering, humanity mostly comes together and starts building a device that will save humanity, but the only have one chance to make it work. However, some religious terrorists infiltrate the project and destroy it. Unfortunately, it was the only one and there's no time to build another, so humanity perishes in the end.
I'd prefer a happier ending though with a bit more of a sci-fi spin. Narratives where everybody dies in the end were gimmicky to begin with and are just becoming tired and depressing now.
Huh? How is that overused? I've only seen it in "Contact", except, unfortunately, the project was saved by the government having enough foresight to build a 2nd, identical and secret machine in Hokkaido, Japan, though I did think that plot point made a good statement about religious nuttery in America (which really isn't a problem here in Japan).
>It'd be much more surprising and inventive to do a story where they do come together and work hard only to fail due to running up against the laws of physics.
I hate those kinds of stories, and this has been seen in sci-fi before too. The whole story is just pointless because it was a no-win scenario from the start, so there's no lesson at all, other than "what's the point of even trying?".
I like my story idea because it makes a good statement about how dangerous and destructive religion is.
>If you want to send a message it would be more productive to harp on the fact that better astronomical programs may have spotted the danger sooner and allowed for other solutions.
That kind of plot won't make for a good story.
>Narratives where everybody dies in the end were gimmicky to begin with and are just becoming tired and depressing now.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here: narrative where everybody dies are not even remotely commonplace in popular fiction. Even Game of Thrones has a happy ending of sorts, though lots of people die along the way. You must be watching or reading some kind of fiction I'm unaware of.
I'd also suggest Crucible of Time by John Brunner, while it doesn't have black holes it does have an astronomical time pressure to it.
Flux is part of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence and again has an astronomical pressure. I'm gonna point out that this particular story has a lot of plot detained on Wikipedia with spoilers so... go there realizing that.
Continuing with Baxter and astronomical pressure... Raft (the first book of the Xeelee Sequence).
An honorable mention in this is another of the great Bs in science fiction his Gregory Before with the Galactic Center Saga... though it lacks the the same astronomical pressures that the other stories I've mentioned have.
Is suspect Netflix PR is somewhere lurking around.
There are more complex orbits possible but these would be more rare and possibly none of those could be stable over billions of years.
https://interestingengineering.com/science/closest-black-hol...
> "To elaborate, the star that died and turned into a black hole would have been at least 20 times as massive as the Sun. This likely means that it must have lived only for a few million years. But, if both stars formed at the same time, the gigantic one would have puffed up and swallowed the other star before it could become a "proper, hydrogen-burning, main-sequence star like our Sun". Or, if the star survived, it should have been on a much tighter orbit."
> means that the black hole and star formed separately and the black hole later captured the star?
That's why they say triplet. It's not actually possible for it to capture it directly without involving a third object.
The speed that the sun goes towards black hole is the exact same speed that it goes away from the black hole, the only way for it to be captured is for it to shed some speed into a third object.
That's why they're having trouble with the scenarios "unlikely" because it's not easy to do that.
Those types of capture is tend to produce extreme and very non-circular orbits. It's extraordinarily unlikely to capture a star and end up in a circular orbit.
480 parsecs => 1500 light years away.
Did they "de-orbit" during the creation of the black hole? Or do the planets orbit the black hole as they were already orbiting the original star before that?
Does that mean you can have a mix of stars and planets orbiting another star? Could it even be possible that a star has planets and a star orbiting it AND the star orbiting it also has it's set of planets orbiting as well?
And what happens to the time on the planets once they orbit closer to the black hole?
So many (and apologies in advance if stupid) questions!
Someone try this w/ Universe Sandbox & report back please :) => https://universesandbox.com/
When our sun exhausts the hydrogen in the core, it will swell as a red giant, encompass the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and likely come very close to earth.
"Black hole B" is currently ten times the mass of our sun. The star that produced it was likely much more massive still. The red giant phase of such a star might have reached to Neptune, so there is no way that these two evolved together.
When the star in this pair exhausts its hydrogen, the black hole will drain the red giant that it becomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93%C5%BBytkow_obj...
The drag will lead to orbital decay.
I wonder if the accreting matter might undergo fusion.
If the mass wouldn't change the orbit wouldn't chance much, they're still orbiting "same" mass.
But in most cases (AFAIK) creation of black hole involves supernova so, well, that ain't gonna be very healthy for the planet itself (lmao) and part of the mass would get ejected and orbits would get more elliptical
The mass of a star required to form the black hole would have swallowed this smaller star in it's formation.
Either way, it's challenging the current conceptions of how binary systems form/work.
Time to read the actual article, I guess. /s
arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06833
Regardless, if its on arxiv why use sci-hub?
> Regardless, if its on arxiv why use sci-hub?
The version on arXiv is likely an earlier one.
All stars in the galaxy are orbiting a supermassive black hole at the center. So this is similar but on a much smaller scale. Maybe the find is illuminating early black hole interaction with nearby stars, idk.
From this observation alone, one can directly sharpen up models not only of the probable number of BH-star binaries in the galaxy, but also models of the number of lonely black holes in the galaxy.
Forty years ago, this might have been a Nobel-winning discovery, as it would have provided new and compelling evidence for the existence of black holes (the dark partner can't be a neutron star because it is far too heavy). That story is now familiar to astrophysicists from many angles. This discovery is still one of the early remarkable results from Gaia -- that dataset is going to continue to shape our understanding of our neighborhood and our universe for decades to come.
It's very cool.
Your typical binary like this is in close orbit, with far higher radial velocities (ie they are spinning like a top), and they show the effects of having been within shooting distance of the creation of their special friend (ie they got fried in a supernova).
There might be one ~960ly away, but that hasn't been confirmed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_known_black_ho...
Can anyone explain these two units - G and pc. I'm assuming d is distance? I've googled it but can't figure them out.
I don't know what the G stands for. Possibly luminosity of some kind?
I think G is Stellar Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification#Class_G which would mean this new star is the same class as our Sun.
pc refers to "parsec," a unit of distance approximately equal to 3.3 light years. Parsecs are a natural unit of distance, because a star that is one parsec away has a yearly parallax "wobble" of one arcsecond (not by accident - this is how the parsec is defined). Parallax is the fundamental way in which distances to nearby stars are measured, so parsecs are the natural unit to use. Every greater distance in astronomy is defined with reference to parsecs: kiloparsecs, Megaparsecs, Gigaparsecs, ...
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)
2. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia
Contrast that with other areas where people who contributed significant amounts of work towards research often get omitted from the work.
I note this from experience as a former academic and being close friends/family with academics.
And our project is a "software only" project. Other projects have to build an experimental device, babysit the device during the experiment, cleanup the noisy experimental data, and then try to reach conclusion, so it's natural to need more authors.