A detached stellar-mass black hole candidate in the globular cluster NGC 3201

By B. Giesers, S. Dreizler, T. Husser, S. Kamann, G. A. Escudé, J. Brinchmann, C. Carollo, M. Roth, P. Weilbacher, L. Wisotzki. 2018

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As part of our massive spectroscopic survey of 25 Galactic globular clusters with MUSE, we performed multiple epoch observations of NGC 3201 with the aim of constraining the binary fraction. In this cluster, we found one curious star at the main-sequence turn-off with radial velocity variations of the order of 100 km/s, indicating the membership to a binary system with an unseen component since no other variations appear in the spectra. Using an adapted variant of the generalized Lomb-Scargle periodogram, we could calculate the orbital parameters and found the companion to be a detached stellar-mass black hole with a minimum mass of 4.36 $\pm$ 0.41 solar masses. The result is an important constraint for binary and black hole evolution models in globular clusters as well as in the context of gravitational wave sources.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab7664329d3e8d96c4aa8b2e495a617cf8d5bb1b

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Modeling Dense Star Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond with the CMC Cluster Catalog (2019, background): “Recently, the MUSE survey 1 team has reported a BH candidate in NGC3201, marking the first identification of a stellar-mass BH via purely dynamical measurements (Giesers et al. 2018).”
A stellar census in globular clusters with MUSE: multiple populations chemistry in NGC 2808 (2019, methodology): “So far, the spectroscopic data collected as part of this survey have been used for various purposes, such as kinematic analyses (Kamann et al. 2018), characterizing binary systems (Giesers et al. 2018), and the search for emission line objects (Göttgens et al. 2019a,b).”