Astronomers have discovered a black hole with an unusually low mass

Astronomers have discovered the first confirmed stellar-mass black hole in the globular cluster Omega Centauri. The invisible object was found thanks to observations of the Hubble and James Webb telescopes for the movement of the companion star. This was announced on July 24 by the news portal Universe Today.

Omega Centauri is located about 18,000 light-years from Earth and includes about 10 million gravitationally bound stars. Models show that there may be approximately 10,000 stellar-mass black holes in the cluster, but so far none of them have been reliably detected.

The researchers analyzed archived Hubble data from 2002 to 2023 and supplemented them with infrared observations from the NIRCam camera of the James Webb telescope. Astrometric measurements made it possible to trace small changes in the position of the visible star in the sky.

It turned out that the star is moving in orbit around an invisible massive object. Previously, it was assumed that its companion could be a neutron star, but new measurements have made it possible to clarify the mass of the system.

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The mass of a visible star is about 0.78 times the mass of the Sun, and an invisible object is 4.46 times the mass of the Sun. According to scientists, this figure is too high for a neutron star and indicates a black hole. The object was designated oMEGACat BH-2. The star makes a complete revolution around the black hole in about 94 years. This is the longest known orbital period among binary systems, one of the components of which is a black hole.

The length of the orbit also indicates that the two objects probably did not form together. A black hole could capture a star already inside a dense cluster. According to calculations, the system will last less than 1 billion years, after which close encounters with neighboring stars can destroy it.

The mass of the black hole was also unusual. It is smaller than expected for an object formed in the heavy element-poor environment of Omega Centauri. The discovery will help refine models of the formation of black holes and binary systems in globular clusters.

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Phys.org On July 12, he reported the identification of different populations of merging black holes. According to the researchers, one possible scenario suggests that two massive stars form and evolve together, and after their death, binary black hole systems form. Another option is associated with dense star clusters, where already formed black holes can converge and form pairs as a result of random gravitational interactions.