Testing the presence of a dormant black hole inside HR 6819


Abstract in English

HR 6819 was reported in Rivinius et al. (2020) to be a triple system with a non-accreting black hole (BH) in its inner binary. In our study we check if this inner binary can be reconstructed using the isolated binary formation channel or the dynamical one within globular star clusters. Our goals are to understand the formation of the inner binary and to test the presence of a non-accreting BH. To simulate the inner binary evolution we assumed that the influence of the third body on the formation of the inner binary is negligible. We tested various models with different values of physical parameters such as the mass loss rate during BH formation or the efficiency of orbital energy loss for common envelope ejection. By comparing the Roche lobe radii with the respective stellar radii no mass transfer event was shown to happen for more than 40 Myr after the BH collapse, suggesting that no accretion disk is supposed to form around the BH during the BH-MS phase. We can therefore reconstruct the system with isolated binaries, although in our simulations we had to adopt non-standard parameter values and to assume no asymmetric mass ejection during the black hole collapse. Out of the whole synthetic Galactic disk BH population only 0.0001% of the BH-MS binaries fall within the observational constraints. We expect only few binaries in the Galactic globular clusters to be potential candidates for the HR 6819 system. Our statistical analysis suggests that despite the HR 6819 inner binary can be reconstructed with isolated binary evolution, this evolutionary channel is unlikely to reproduce its reported parameters. Under the initial assumption that the outer star doesnt impact the evolution of its inner binary, we argue that the absence of a third body proposed by El-Badry & Quataert (2021) and Bodensteiner, J. et al. (2020) might be a more natural explanation for the given observational data.

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