Tomar Shenar calls his colleague, Kareem El-Badry, the “black hole destroyer.”
It’s pretty rare, and a little unusual.
Shenar noted that the unknown stellar companion has a mass about nine times greater than our sun.
The challenge was then to prove this unknown cosmic object could not be anythingbuta black hole.
This animation shows how the two cosmic objects of VFTS 243 orbit each other.
This is not to scale – data suggests the star is about 200,000 times larger than the black hole.
There was a list of possibilities for the companion object, according to Shenar.
It might have been another normal star, about six times as massive as our sun.
For someone hailed as a “black hole debunker,” that seems like a fairly significant claim.
He added that there are no alternatives in our current knowledge.
“Either it’s a far invisible alien, or a black hole,” he said.
Eventually, one of these stars runs out of fuel and collapses.
But the black hole in VFTS 243 appears to have collapsed without exploding at all.
A curiosity, but not without precedent.
Both these curiosities are important in understanding binary black hole systems and how they form.
We’ve been talking about all this creation, but now let’s get back to the destruction.
That’s predicted to occur in a few hundred billion years.
