Astronomers Find a Black Hole That was Somehow Pushed Over Onto its Side

Artist impression of the X-ray binary system MAXI J1820+070 containing a black hole (small black dot at the center of the gaseous disk) and a companion star. A narrow jet is directed along the black hole spin axis, which is strongly misaligned from the rotation axis of the orbit. Image produced with Binsim (credit: R. Hynes).

The planets in our Solar System all rotate on axes that roughly match the Sun’s rotational axis. This agreement between the axes of rotation is the typical arrangement in any system in space where smaller objects orbit a larger one.

But in one distant binary system, the large central object has an axis of rotation tilted about 40 degrees compared to its smaller satellite. This situation is even more strange because the main body isn’t a star but a black hole.

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Astronomers Find a New Binary Object in the Kuiper Belt

This image is an artist’s impression of the trans-Neptunian object that two Southwest Research Institute scientists recently discovered is a binary object. Image Credit: SwRI

Scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have presented the discovery of a binary pair of objects way out in the Kuiper Belt. They’re Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) which means their orbit is outside the orbit of Neptune, our Solar System’s outermost planet. This binary pair is unusual because of their close proximity with one another.

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