First, there was a black hole, now there isn't. This is how science works: scientists work like detectives to uncover the truth.
. It didn’t interact with the matter around it as other stellar-mass black holes do. Astronomers usually discover black holes as they draw material towards themselves, heat it, and release x-rays. But this one didn’t; it’s a non-accreting black hole, and astronomers discovered it through gravitational interactions with its two close neighbours. It was called a quiet black hole, and at the time, astronomers thought there must be many more of them and that the discovery was the tip of the iceberg.
The system in question is called HR 6819. The 2019 paper announced a three-star system with a non-accreting black hole and two stellar companions. Researchers were looking for double-star systems when they found HR 6819. The closest star’s orbit was affected by the hole’s presence, they thought at the time. They learned the black hole’s mass by figuring out the closest star’s orbit.
“HR 6819 is a hierarchical triple star with a non-accreting BH in the inner binary,” the authors said in the conclusion of their 2019 paper. But something else they wrote foreshadows the new study showing that there is no black hole: “The detection was facilitated by the incompatibility of the spectral sequences with a simple binary.” It turns out they were correct when they said the spectral sequences were incompatible with a simple binary, but their conclusion was incorrect.
This is a simplified schematic of HR 6819’s spectral lines. Image Credit: ESO/J. C. Munoz-Mateos, D. Catricheo There’s a third study involved in this narrative. Julia Bodensteiner, then a Ph.D. student at KU Leuven, Belgium, ledpublished in 2020. In that study, the authors wrote that “We re-investigate the properties of HR 6819 to search for a possibly simpler alternative explanation for HR 6819, which does not invoke the presence of a triple system with a BH in the inner binary.”…” they wrote in their conclusion.
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