The stars the scientists observed are known as S-stars, and most of them are young formed within the past 6 million years and massive. They are mostly located within a light-month, or a little under 500 billion miles, of the black hole (
).
Stars this young shouldn’t even be near the black hole in the first place. They couldn’t have migrated to this region in just 6 million years. But to have a star form in such a hostile environment is surprising.
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Hence, researchers used data taken with Keck’s adaptive optics instruments to conduct the first-ever search for spectroscopic binary stars among the S-stars. Spectroscopic binary stars appear through optical telescopes to be single stars but, when the light they emit is analyzed by scientists, are revealed to be pairs of stars.
Mutual Destruction: Binary Stars, Black Holes, and Ripples in Space-Time
Even more surprising, they found that the number of pairs of S-stars that could exist near the black hole was much lower than the number of comparable stars in the section of space surrounding Earth’s sun, known as the solar neighborhood.
They did this by calculating a metric called the binary fraction, which defines how many stars in a given area could come in pairs; the higher the binary fraction, the more stars that could exist in pairs.
Previous studies have shown that the binary fraction for stars similar to S-stars in Earth’s solar neighborhood is around 70%. In the new study, the researchers found that near the Milky Way’s black hole, the upper limit is just 47% suggesting that the extreme environment of the black hole is limiting the survival of stellar binaries.
This difference speaks to the incredibly interesting environment of the center of our galaxy; we’re not dealing with a normal environment here. This also suggests that the black hole drives these nearby binary stars to merge or be disrupted (2✔ ✔Trusted Source
Evidence of a Decreased Binary Fraction for Massive Stars within 20 milliparsecs of the Supermassive Black Hole at the Galactic Center
Go to source), which has important implications for the production of gravitational waves and hypervelocity stars ejected from the galactic center.
Researchers now planning to explore how the limit on the binary fraction they calculated compares to the binary fraction for similar stars that are located farther from the black hole, but still within its gravitational influence.
References :
- Predicting the binary black hole population of the Milky Way with cosmological simulations – (https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/480/2/2704/5060782)
- Evidence of a Decreased Binary Fraction for Massive Stars within 20 milliparsecs of the Supermassive Black Hole at the Galactic Center
– (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acc93e)
Source: Eurekalert
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