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Re:Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth by spuz on Saturday November 05, 2022 @07:55AM (#33480610)
> Astronomers' current models of the evolution of binary systems cannot fully explain how the peculiar configuration of the Gaia BH1 system came about, because the original star that later became this black hole should have been at least 20 times more massive than our Sun. This means that it would have lived only a few million years. If both stars formed at the same time, this massive star would have rapidly become a supergiant, inflating and engulfing the other star before it had time to become a proper main-sequence star, burning hydrogen just like our own Sun.

> It's not entirely clear how the solar-mass star survived that episode, ending up an apparently normal star, as observations indicate. All theoretical models that allow for this survival predict that the solar-mass star should be in a much tighter orbit than is actually observed.

Should this last sentence actually read: "All theoretical models that allow for this survival predict that the solar-mass star should be in a much wider orbit than is actually observed."?

Re:Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth by Broken_Hippo on Saturday November 05, 2022 @08:05AM (#33480669)
Maybe, but I'll give some slack here. Translations aren't perfect and maybe it read better before translation.
Re:Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth by tete on Saturday November 05, 2022 @08:11AM (#33480701)
Why? It's just the closest detected one.
Re:Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth by Broken_Hippo on Saturday November 05, 2022 @08:34AM (#33480814)
Ok. So?

The issue here is that I don't read spanish. I used a translator - google, actually. And I know painfully well that sometimes translations are clunky even when they are generally good. I don't have a lot of experience between Spanish and English, but I do with Norwegian-English, and those are both germanic languages and often translate decently.

But not always. Some things are just messed up. Some things don't translate word-for-word simply because folks express things differently.

So yeah, it might be weird in English. Might not be in Spanish, though.

Re:Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth by narag on Saturday November 05, 2022 @12:15PM (#33482856)
It's the same in the Spanish version.
Re:Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth by Broken_Hippo on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:28AM (#33490733)
Is it a more normal way to speak in spanish?

Here, an example in Timekeeping:

English and Norwegian speak about time differently. Direct translations from Norwegian to English - the sort you get with translate - will make it seem very, very weird. "Ti over halv ni" directly translates to "Ten over half nine": If you take the user suggestion, it says "Ten over eight thirty". In other words, 8:40 or twenty til nine.

While these are both technically correct, it still is a clunky way to talk about time when you are using English.

"The same in spanish" doesn't mean that it is the right expression in both languages.

Re:Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth by fmblwntr on Saturday November 05, 2022 @01:19PM (#33483453)
No, from the abstract of the paper "The orbital period, 185.6 days, is longer than that of any known stellar mass black hole binary. [...] How the system formed is uncertain. Common envelope evolution can only produce the system's wide orbit under extreme and likely unphysical assumptions"

See section 8.4 for details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06833 But basically the idea is that they are assumed to have interacted in the past (based on the distance), and given that, all current models of such interactions would predict a very tight final orbit for the solar mass star.