“Our best-fit model suggests these stars will merge as black holes in 18 billion years. But so far we have yet to observe stars that are predicted to collapse into black holes of this size and merge in a time scale shorter than or even broadly comparable to the age of the universe. PhD student Matthew Rickard (UCL Physics & Astronomy), lead author of the study, said: “Thanks to gravitational wave detectors Virgo and LIGO, dozens of black hole mergers have been detected in the last few years. These black holes will form in only a couple of million years, but will then orbit each other for billions of years before colliding with such force that they will generate gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time – that could theoretically be detected with instruments on Earth. The surviving star will become a black hole shortly after. They orbit each other every three days and are the most massive touching stars (known as contact binaries) yet observed.Ĭomparing the results of their observations with theoretical models of binary stars’ evolution, they found that, in the best-fit model, the star that is currently being fed on will become a black hole and will feed on its companion star. The researchers found that the stars, located in a neighboring dwarf galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud, are in partial contact and swapping material with each other, with one star currently “feeding” off the other. The study, accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, looked at a known binary star (two stars orbiting around a mutual center of gravity), analyzing starlight obtained from a range of ground- and space-based telescopes. Two massive touching stars in a neighboring galaxy are on course to become black holes that will eventually crash together, generating waves in the fabric of space-time, according to a new study by researchers at University College London and the University of Potsdam. The stars are white and blue as they are so hot: 43,000 and 38,000 degrees Kelvin respectively. The smaller, brighter, hotter star (left), which is 32 times the mass of our Sun, is currently losing mass to its bigger companion (right), which has 55 times the mass of our Sun.
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