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Have astronomers found a new class of tiny black hole?
Black holes are the cosmic champions of hide-and-seek. Einstein predicted they existed in 1916, but it took over 100 years before a telescope as wide as the world snapped the first picture of a black hole. They're elusive beasts, avoiding detection because they swallow up light. Even so, astronomers can see the tell-tale signs of black holes in the universe by studying different forms of radiation, like X-rays. So far, that's worked -- and a huge number of black holes have been discovered by looking for these signs.
However, an entirely new detection method, pioneered by researchers at The Ohio State University, suggests there may be a whole population of black holes we've been missing.
The findings, published in the journal Science on Nov. 1, detail the discovery of a black hole orbiting the giant star 2MASS J05215658+4359220 (J05215658, for short) using data from Earth-based telescopes and Gaia satellite observations. The team shows J05215658 is being orbited by a massive unseen companion -- and they suspect it might be an entirely new class of black holes.
A noninteracting low-mass black hole–giant star binary system, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aau4005)
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Monday November 04 2019, @05:20PM
Neutron stars are also quite difficult to observe, when they don't have an axis that causes their radio signals to periodically sweep across our observation. And that means almost all of them. And the older ones are expected to be pretty quiet anyway.
So the difficulty of observation doesn't allow one to choose between black hole and neutron star. The choice has to have been either on theoretical grounds, or on "what will grab the headlines". (I do notice that even in the summary they qualify with the term "might".)
My wild guess would be neutron stars, but perhaps they've got grounds to thing a neutron star couldn't be that heavy.
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