The most compact star-black hole binary has been discovered, but the star seems to be perfectly happy whirling around the massive singularity twice an hour.
A star in the globular cluster of 47 Tucanae is living on the edge of oblivion.
Located near a stellar-mass black hole at only 2.5 times the Earth-moon distance, the white dwarf appears to be in a stable orbit, but it’s still paying the price for being so intimate with its gravitational master. As observed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NuSTAR space telescope, plus the Australia Telescope Compact Array, gas is being pulled from the white dwarf, which then spirals into the black hole’s super-heated accretion disk.
47 Tucanae is located in our galaxy, around 14,800 light-years from Earth.
Eventually, the white dwarf will become so depleted of plasma that it will turn into some kind of exotic planetary-mass body or it will simply evaporate away. But one thing does appear certain, the white dwarf will remain in orbit and isn’t likely to get swallowed by the black hole whole any time soon.
“This white dwarf is so close to the black hole that material is being pulled away from the star and dumped onto a disk of matter around the black hole before falling in,” said Arash Bahramian, of the University of Alberta (Canada) and Michigan State University. “Luckily for this star, we don’t think it will follow this path into oblivion, but instead will stay in orbit.” Bahramian is the lead author of the study to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
It was long thought that globular clusters were bad locations to find black holes, but the 2015 discovery of the binary system — called “X9” — generating quantities of radio waves inside 47 Tucanae piqued astronomers’ interest. Follow-up studies revealed fluctuating X-ray emissions with a period of around 28 minutes — the approximate orbital period of the white dwarf around the black hole.
So, how did the white dwarf become the pet of this black hole?
The leading theory is that the black hole collided with an old red giant star. In this scenario, the black hole would have quickly ripped away the bloated star’s outer layers, leaving a tiny stellar remnant — a white dwarf — in its wake. The white dwarf then became the black hole’s gravitational captive, forever trapped in its gravitational grasp. Its orbit would have become more and more compact as the system generated gravitational waves (i.e. ripples in space-time), radiating orbital energy away, shrinking its orbital distance to the configuration that it is in today.
It is now hoped that more binary systems of this kind will be found, perhaps revealing that globular clusters are in fact very good places to find black holes enslaving other stars.
astroengine.com 