A triple system with a silent black hole.

Many black holes appear to form a pair with another object, be it a star, a neutron star or another black hole, they usually spiral around each other attracted by the gravity of the black hole that has more mass and in this way create a pair narrow orbital, but what astronomers have now discovered is very strange. This system contains a central black hole that is in the act of slowly consuming a small star that spirals very close to the black hole, tearing matter from it every little bit. This star takes 6 and a half days to go around the hole. black, this is terrible for the small star, but it is within the normal range of a black hole, these are its “customs” and we must respect them. The surprising thing is that there is a second star that also appears to be revolving around the black hole, although at a much greater distance. Physicists estimate that this other star orbits the black hole every 70,000 years at a distance that is equivalent to 100 times the distance that separates Pluto from the sun.

That a black hole appears to have a gravitational attraction on such a distant object raises questions about its origin, how this is possible, the key to this question is that current theory tells us that black holes are formed from violent explosions. of a dying massive star, a process known as a supernova by which that star releases an enormous amount of energy and light in a final burst before collapsing and transforming into a black hole, but if this black hole we are talking about was born from a typical supernova, the powerful energy of the explosion should have expelled any loosely bound object that was in its surroundings, such as that star that orbits it so far away, this second star, the outermost one, that one should not be there. It could be that this star had originated somewhere else and was captured by the gravity of the black hole. The researchers studied that possibility, but they ended up ruling it out because the speeds at which a star travels through space are very high, for example ours. Dear sun, it moves around the galaxy at about 828,000 km per hour, it takes our galaxy around 225 to 250 million years to go around the Milky Way, it is what is known as a galactic year, by the way and with the The sun obviously also moves all the planets, asteroids and comets, and also the Earth, so when, for example, we celebrate the new year, the Earth is 7,253 million kilometers away from the place where it was on January 1 of the previous year, too. We are taking a trip around the galaxy.

At those speeds at which the stars move it would have been very difficult for this specific black hole to capture said star, I say specific because this is not a supermassive black hole, it is one of stellar mass, it is estimated that it has a mass of about 12 at 13 times the mass of the sun, while super massive black holes play in another league in a super league those have more than a million solar masses and some more than 1 billion solar masses. Another piece of information that would confirm that the star was already part of that original triple system is that it is the same age as the other two elements, it is estimated that it is about 4,000 million years old and this paints the following picture, about 4,000 million years ago. three stars were born, two normal ones that orbited another giant, giant stars live intensely and die soon, for example, while a star like the sun can live more than 10,000 million years, the most massive stars last about 10 million years or less, So that star must have exploded in a supernova and in theory it should have expelled the outermost star, so what is that star doing there is what astronomers are wondering. What is suggested is that it could be another possibility that something very strange had occurred, of which there are suspicions and of which it has been theorized for a long time. In fact, for more than 20 years we could be facing a silent black hole, which Like the rest of black holes, they are born from the collapse of a massive star, but curiously without a supernova explosion.

The thing would be like watching the star shine and suddenly turn it off towards a central black point like old televisions did. In 2003 an article was published in a scientific magazine where the following was warned: "the models predict that rare stars at "At least 40 times heavier than our sun should fall directly into black holes without exploding, because their enormous outer layers cushion the shock wave like the heavy lid of a pressure cooker." This discovery in V404 Cygni could be one of those strange cases, which also raises a disturbing question: we currently detect black holes because they are eating matter and the matter that orbits around them shines with great intensity and emits a lot of radiation, too. We can see remains of ancient supernovae that could reveal the existence of a black hole at their center, but now we know that you can see silent black holes that form without a supernova explosion, that do not leave clues that are impossible to detect. This one that's in the news now is about 8,000 light years away, but what if there were one of these silent black holes in our stellar neighborhood.