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A Sun-like star orbiting a black hole
- dpeck 4y agoNearly everyone who was a teenager in the 1990s had the same song lyric play in their head When reading this headline.
- Maursault 4y agoThis one?[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGBB0hTqo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGBB0hTqo0
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mynegation 4y agoOoh, well played! Not GP, but - yes - this one.
- tantalor 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lounge-A-Palooza https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lounge-A-Palooza
- ISL 4y agoThat's incredible.
- lostgame 4y agoYou have made my day. This is amazing.
- rtanks 4y agoAnd some adults
- BurningFrog 4y agoThis was the second most played song on the radio when I drove to Idaho for the 2017 eclipse.
- wwarner 4y ago`This is the nearest known black hole by a factor of 3, and its discovery suggests the existence of a sizable population of dormant black holes in binaries.` 480 parsecs => 1500 light years away.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoI’m not an academic so maybe this is normal but 20+ “authors” of a paper seems crazy to me.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoSeems to be common these days in astrophysics and particle physics, where you have many teams across multiple institutions collaborating on the research.
- zh217 4y agoIt's actually quite normal for experimental and observational subjects, which is the case for this one. I believe the record is set by one with over 5000 authors - see https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17567 for details.
- rrwo 4y agoFor some subject areas, this is normal. Everyone who contributed something to the research gets credit. (I think in Physics the authors are listed alphabetically as well.) 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.
- taubek 4y agoFor some science fields it is totally normal to have so many people working on the same paper/project.
- gus_massa 4y agoI've been in ~10 authors papers. They were a collaboration of two ~5 persons groups of different universities. Each group has a different method tuned for a similar topic, and the idea was to use both of them together to get a better result. 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.
- maaaaattttt 4y agoIf the star is close enough I have a hard time imagining what is happening to its orbiting planets. 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!
- devoutsalsa 4y agoLet's assume the Star A and the Black Hole B hole orbited each other when the black hole was Star B. If Star B collapsed into a black hole of roughly the same mass, I don't think Star A & its planets would be affected much at all in terms or orbits. Maybe the Star A system would have been fried when Star B went supernova, but the orbits I don't think would change all that much. It's like how people say Earth would continue orbiting the center of our solar system if our sun turned into a black hole, as the center of gravity would be the same. Someone try this w/ Universe Sandbox & report back please :) => https://universesandbox.com/ https://universesandbox.com/
- chasil 4y ago"Star A" is nearly the mass of our sun. 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.
- pmontra 4y agoDisclaimer: I can't make any calculation but... Wouldn't Star A keep orbiting Star B inside the surface of Red Giant Star B, which wouldn't be very dense at the radius of the orbit? There is drag but a lot of inertia. Star A would start from further away than now. It would probably get some extra mass in the process, absorbing the gas of the red giant.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoNot sure if I got the masses right but using 9.62 solar masses and 0.92 solar masses for the black hole and the star respectively with a period of 185 days gives me a semi-major axis of 1.39 AU (using an orbital period calculator). If that's correct then this star is orbiting quite close to the black hole. Chances of it having any planets would be quite small although I suppose there could be planets orbiting the binary system at a large distance. 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.
- sulam 4y agoThat’s how I interpret this as well.
- n4r9 4y ago> the black hole later captured the star? Hopefully the star had no life bearing planets before that 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?
- chaosbolt 4y agoWould the star's system orbiting the black hole change anything for its planets though? It's like with us, we barely care about Pluto let alone some distant object the sun and us as well are orbiting.
- akiselev 4y agoIf the black hole formed while in the system, the resulting radiation would wipe out all life in a light year radius. If the black hole captured the star, the tidal forces would slowly rip the planets apart.
- karmakaze 4y agoI'm not sure I understand the significance. Is it observation of something we'd expect anyway or something more. 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.
- ISL 4y agoUnless I'm now out-of-date, it is the first time a system quite like this has been observed. Quiet star quietly orbiting in a black-hole binary. Furthermore, it is very close to us on cosmological scales -- in our own galaxy, just over 1% of a galactic-diameter distant. 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.
- sulam 4y agoIt’s not a typical binary. The money quote is 2/3 of the way down, essentially saying this is a bog standard G-type star with no obvious means to end up in this configuration that doesn’t involve complex interactions, up to and including a black hole wandering by and capturing the star (and probably sending all its planets spinning off into the universe). 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).
- pohl 4y agoThe title does bury the lede: this discovery is the closest confirmed black hole now. Before that, the closest was ~3000ly away. There might be one ~960ly away, but that hasn't been confirmed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_known_black_holes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_known_black_ho...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Tepix 4y agoThe paper is not yet on sci-hub. arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06833 https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06833
- soraki_soladead 4y agoIs sci-hub still adding papers? I thought it was stalled because of a court case in India. Regardless, if its on arxiv why use sci-hub?
- Tepix 4y agoI think they started adding papers again. > Regardless, if its on arxiv why use sci-hub? The version on arXiv is likely an earlier one.
- exhilaration 4y agoWe report discovery of a bright, nearby (G = 13.8; d = 480pc) Sun-like star orbiting a dark object. 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.
- flebron 4y agopc = Parsec :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec I don't know what the G stands for. Possibly luminosity of some kind?
- exhilaration 4y agoBrightness seems to be measured as apparent magnitude but that's denoted by m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude I think G is Stellar Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification#Class_G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification#Class_G which would mean this new star is the same class as our Sun.
- captaincrowbar 4y agoG is the apparent magnitude in the green part of the spectrum. Astronomers have a standardised set of optical bandpass filters to record the brightness of a star at various wavelengths - U (ultraviolet), B (blue), V (visual), G (green), etc. Using the letter ID of the filter to mean "apparent magnitude as seen through this filter" is a common convention.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y agoG is for "Gaia," not "green." This is a wide band that covers most of the visible part of the spectrum. See: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/iow_20180316 https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/iow_20180316
- DiogenesKynikos 4y agoG refers to the apparent magnitude[0] in the main filter used by the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope (one of the most important scientific missions going on right now, though the public is less aware of it than, say, JWST).[1,2] 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft) 2. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia
- PicassoCTs 4y agoCould life develop and survive in a green belt orbit around such a extreme system?
- jayess 4y agoWhat is a dormant black hole?
- deathanatos 4y agoMy SO humorously proposes "Dyson Sphere" as the explanation for the dark companion mass.
- phoe-krk 4y agoAfter reading the title, my mind immediately created a headcanon that the black hole is Oracle and Sun is inevitably getting sucked in at some point. Time to read the actual article, I guess. /s