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On the signature of a 70-solar-mass black hole in LB-1

Nature volume 580, pages E11–E15 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 29 April 2020

The Original Article was published on 27 November 2019

arising from: J. Liu et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1766-2 (2019)

Massive stellar-mass black holes are not expected in a Galactic metallicity environment, owing to strong stellar winds and pair-instability supernovae. In this context, the recent report1 of an approximately 70-solar-mass (M☉) black hole in the galactic binary system LB-1 challenges conventional theories of massive-star evolution, stellar winds and core-collapse supernovae, thus requiring a more exotic scenario to explain the existence and properties of this system2,3. Here we show that the apparent shifts of the Hα emission line used to derive the mass of the black hole arise from the orbital motion of the B-type companion star in the LB-1 binary system and not from that of the black hole. No evidence for a massive black hole remains in the data, thus removing the existing tension between its proposed existence and models of the formation of such a massive black hole at galactic metallicity.

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Fig. 1: Reconstructed Hα emission profile in LB-1.
Fig. 2: Simulating the radial-velocity signal resulting from a static Hα emission and a Doppler-shifting stellar absorption.

Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO, Research Foundation Flanders) under project IDs G0F8H6N, G0B3818N, 12ZY520N, G0H5416N and GST-D6267-I002519N, and from the Onderzoeksraad (Research Council), KU Leuven under project IDs C16/17/007, C16/18/005 and C14/17/082. This project received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement numbers 772225 MULTIPLES and 670519 MAMSIE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Michael Abdul-Masih, Gareth Banyard, Julia Bodensteiner, Emma Bordier, Dominic M. Bowman, Karan Dsilva, Matthias Fabry, Calum Hawcroft, Laurent Mahy, Pablo Marchant, Gert Raskin, Maddalena Reggiani, Tomer Shenar, Andrew Tkachenko, Hans Van Winckel & Hugues Sana

  2. Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium

    Lore Vermeylen

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  1. Michael Abdul-Masih
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Contributions

This paper is based on an original idea by M.A.-M. J.B. prepared the observations. L.V. was the observer. H.V.W. and G.R. performed the HERMES data reduction. J.B. and L.M. performed the atmospheric analysis. M.A.-M., K.D., G.B. and T.S. studied the impact of the mixed profile on the radial-velocity measurements. D.M.B., E.B., M.F., L.M., T.S., A.T. and H.S. contributed to various aspects of the data analysis. All authors contributed to the discussion and interpretation of the results and commented on the written draft of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hugues Sana.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Stellar atmosphere fitting to the LB-1 optical spectrum.

a, b, Top, best atmosphere model adjusted using the Grid Search in Stellar Parameters (GSSP) fitting suite (red) overlaid on the observed HERMES spectrum (black); and bottom, residuals of the fit. a and b each show a different small portion of the spectrum around the diagnostic lines of interest.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Chi-squared distributions of the atmosphere fitting.

a–d, Chi-squared maps of the GSSP atmosphere fitting projected on the one-dimensional parameter space for effective temperature (a), surface gravity (b), projected rotational velocity (c) and metallicity (d). The black data points are models, the blue solid and black dotted lines show linear and cubic interpolations through the best-fit grid points, respectively, and the horizontal red line corresponds to the adopted 1σ confidence threshold.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Methods and Discussion, Supplementary Figures 1–4 and Supplementary References.

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Abdul-Masih, M., Banyard, G., Bodensteiner, J. et al. On the signature of a 70-solar-mass black hole in LB-1. Nature 580, E11–E15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2216-x

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