The University of Southampton

Research into black holes published in Science

Published: 10 April 2013

Astronomy Research Fellow Dr Teo Munoz-Darias is part of a team whose paper about the discovery of a mysterious structure around a black hole has been published in the latest edition of the prestigious Science journal.

Teo was the third author of the paper led by his colleagues from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, in Spain.

Their paper explains how the black hole was obscured by a disc of gas with a vertical structure that was continually expanding away from the black hole. It is the first time that a black hole has been seen with this inclination and the researchers describe how it resembles an immense doughnut.

“Swift J1357.2-0933 is a binary system located more than 5,000 light years away from the Earth, harbouring a ‘normal’ star and a stellar-mass black hole that feeds off its companion star. Our investigation followed the outburst evolution of the system, an event that occurs only once in decades or centuries,” said Teo.

“We observed unexpected partial eclipses in the system that lasted and were repeated every few minutes. They led us to two conclusions – we had to be viewing the black hole edge on and part of the matter being drawn from the companion star formed a vertical structure that is causing the eclipses. We believe this newly discovered structure can be present in other black hole systems as well,” he added.

Black holes are formed following the death of very massive stars and it is difficult to see them as they don’t emit any light. If they are alone it is almost impossible to find them and therefore they are only discovered when they are interacting with very nearby stars. Since the first one was detected in 1964, only 18 other black holes have been found in our galaxy - Swift J1357.2-0933 is the latest one in the list.

The full paper is published in Science, the world’s leading journal of original scientific research, global news and commentary and can be read online

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