No Arabic abstract
Up to now, most stellar-mass black holes were discovered in X-ray emitting binaries, in which the black holes are formed through a common-envelope evolu tion. Here we give evidence for the presence of a massive black hole candidate as a tertiary companion in the massive eclipsing binary V Puppis. We found that the orbital period of this short-period binary (P=1.45 days) shows a periodic variation while it undergoes a long-term increase. The cyclic period oscillation can be interpreted by the light-travel time effect via the presence of a third body with a mass no less than 10.4 solar mass. However, no spectral lines of the third body were discovered indicating that it is a massive black hole candidate. The black hole candidate may correspond to the weak X-ray source close to V Puppis discovered by Uhuru, Copernicus, and ROSAT satellites produced by accreting materials from the massive binary via stellar wind. The circumstellar matter with many heavy elements around this binary may be formed by the supernova explosion of the progenitor of the massive black hole. All of the observations suggest that a massive black hole is orbiting the massive close binary V Puppis with a period of 5.47 years. Meanwhile, we found the central close binary is undergoing slow mass transfer from the secondary to the primary star on a nuclear time scale of the secondary component, revealing that the system has passed through a rapid mass-transfer stage.
In light of the recent suggestion that the nearby eclipsing binary star system V Puppis has a dark companion on a long orbit, we present the results of radio and X-ray observations of it. We find an upper limit on its radio flux of about 300 $mu$Jy and a detection of it in the X-rays with a luminosity of about 3$times10^{31}$ erg/sec, a value much lower than what had been observed in some of the low angular resolution surveys of the past. These data are in good agreement with the idea that the X-ray emission from V Puppis comes from mass transfer between the two B stars in the system, but can still accommodate the idea that the X-ray emission comes from the black hole accreting stellar wind from one or both of the B stars.
In this Letter we explore the hypothesis that the quasar SDSSJ092712.65+294344.0 is hosting a massive black hole binary embedded in a circumbinary disc. The lightest, secondary black hole is active, and gas orbiting around it is responsible for the blue-shifted broad emission lines with velocity off-set of 2650 km/s, relative to the galaxy rest frame. As the tidal interaction of the binary with the outer disc is expected to excavate a gap, the blue-shifted narrow emission lines are consistent with being emitted from the low-density inhomogeneous gas of the hollow region. From the observations we infer a binary mass ratio q ~ 0.3, a mass for the primary of M1 ~ 2 billion Msun and a semi-major axis of 0.34 pc, corresponding to an orbital period of 370 years. We use the results of cosmological merger trees to estimate the likely-hood of observing SDSSJ092712.65+294344.0 as recoiling black hole or as a binary. We find that the binary hypothesis is preferred being one hundred times more probable than the ejection hypothesis. If SDSSJ092712.65+294344.0 hosts a binary, it would be the one closest massive black hole binary system ever discovered.
The first directly detected gravitational waves (GW 150914) were emitted by two coalescing black holes (BHs) with masses of ~36Msun and ~29Msun. Several scenarios have been proposed to put this detection into an astrophysical context. The evolution of an isolated massive binary system is among commonly considered models. Various groups have performed detailed binary-evolution calculations that lead to BH merger events. However, the question remains open as to whether binary systems with the predicted properties really exist. The aim of this paper is to help observers to close this gap by providing spectral characteristics of massive binary BH progenitors during a phase where at least one of the companions is still non-degenerate. Stellar evolution models predict fundamental stellar parameters. Using these as input for our stellar atmosphere code (PoWR), we compute a set of models for selected evolutionary stages of massive merging BH progenitors at different metallicities. The synthetic spectra obtained from our atmosphere calculations reveal that progenitors of massive BH merger events start their lives as O2-3V stars that evolve to early-type blue supergiants before they undergo core-collapse during the Wolf-Rayet phase. When the primary has collapsed, the remaining system will appear as a wind-fed high-mass X-ray binary. We provide feedback parameters, broad band magnitudes, and spectral templates that should help to identify such binaries in the future. Comparisons of empirically determined mass-loss rates with those assumed by evolution calculations reveal significant differences. The consideration of the empirical mass-loss rates in evolution calculations will possibly entail a shift of the maximum in the predicted binary-BH merger rate to higher metallicities, that is, more candidates should be expected in our cosmic neighborhood than previously assumed.
We report on the spectroscopic monitoring of GCIRS16SW, an Ofpe/WN9 star and LBV candidate in the central parsec of the Galaxy. SINFONI observations show strong daily spectroscopic changes in the K band. Radial velocities are derived from the HeI 2.112 um line complex and vary regularly with a period of 19.45 days, indicating that the star is most likely an eclipsing binary. Under various assumptions, we are able to derive a mass of ~ 50 Msun for each component.
In an EHT study of a Jy-level target, Safarzadeh et al. (2019) show how astrometric monitoring could constrain massive black hole binaries with the wide separations that make them long-lived against gravitational wave losses, and with the small mass ratios expected from merged satellite galaxies. With this ngVLA study, we show how such frontier topics could be explored for the more numerous mJy-level targets, such as NGC,4472. We also discuss how ngVLA astrometric monitoring could test the upper limits from pulsar timing arrays on gravitational waves from NGC,4472.