Unprecedented thing appears next to black hole, confusing scientists

A black hole in the constellation Cygnus and its two ghostly companions have challenged long-standing cosmological understanding.

According to Live Science , for the first time, scientists have discovered an extremely strange "trinity" system in the world of stars, with one of them having turned into a black hole and having a complex relationship with two companions.

The discovery comes from studying the "vampire" black hole V404 Cygni located 7,800 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

The "vampire" black hole V404 Cygni and its companion are being eaten by it - (Graphic image: NASA).

V404 Cygni has a companion that was known for many years, a star that was "dancing" with it in a close orbit of just 6.5 days and was slowly "cannibalized" by it .

But the latest data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia mission shows something very strange.

Gaia is mapping the three-dimensional positions of objects in our Milky Way galaxy, and specifically recording the directions and velocities of objects as they move through the galaxy.

V404 Cygni and the seemingly unrelated star are moving through space in the same direction and at the same speed.

The third star in the system (above) is seen alongside the black hole cluster and its closer companion star - (Image: ESA).

"It's almost certainly not a coincidence or an accident. We're seeing two stars following each other because they're bound by a weak gravitational bond," said physicist Kevin Burdge from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-author.

That suggests that the mysterious star and the V404 Cygni black hole must be in the same system, even though they travel 3,500 astronomical units (AU) apart, or 3,500 times the Sun-Earth distance.

The absurdity also arises: If this second companion exists, the black hole V404 Cygni could not have been born from a supernova explosion.

That is the point that shakes cosmological theories, because previously, scientists thought that stellar-mass black holes were formed from the final explosion of a giant star.

Because even if they orbit each other with an orbital period of up to 70,000 days, the newly discovered star - which is only bound to the other two objects by a weak gravitational bond - will be blown out of the system.

This leads to an interesting hypothesis: V404 Cygni formed from the gradual collapse of a star.

If it came into being that way, the black hole must have begun forming at some point around 4 billion years ago, when its two companions were still "newborns."