A suspected black hole turns out to be a rapidly spinning star

Sometimes massive stars can mimic the behavior of a black hole and trick astronomers into misinterpreting their nature. Such is the case with a strange pair of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) cluster NGC 1850. The system was initially thought to contain a star about five times the mass of the sun orbiting a stellar-mass black hole. Now, a new study led by Rhys Seeburger of Liverpool John Moores University demonstrates that this is a black hole "impostor" system. The research paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Oct. 27.