A surprising discovery about the black hole V404 Cygnus is expanding our understanding of black holes, the objects they can host, and the way they form.
Many black holes detected to date appear to be part of a pair. These binary systems comprise a black hole and a secondary object -- such as a star, a much denser neutron star, or another black hole -- that spiral around each other, drawn together by the black hole's gravity to form a tight orbital pair.
Instead, the team suspects the black hole formed through a more gentle process of"direct collapse," in which a star simply caves in on itself, forming a black hole without a last dramatic flash. Such a gentle origin would hardly disturb any loosely bound, faraway objects. The team had been looking within the Milky Way galaxy for signs of new black holes. Out of curiosity, Burdge reviewed an image of V404 Cygni -- a black hole about 8,000 light years from Earth that was one of the very first objects ever to be confirmed as a black hole, in 1992. Since then, V404 Cygni has become one of the most well-studied black holes, and has been documented in over 1,300 scientific papers. However, none of those studies reported what Burdge and his colleagues observed.
"It's almost certainly not a coincidence or accident," Burdge says."We're seeing two stars that are following each other because they're attached by this weak string of gravity. So this has to be a triple system."How, then, could the system have formed? If the black hole arose from a typical supernova, the violent explosion would have kicked away the outer star long ago.
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