A black hole detected in the young massive LMC cluster NGC 1850

We report on the detection of a black hole (NGC 1850 BH1) in the ∼100-Myr-old massive cluster NGC 1850 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is in a binary system with a main-sequence turn-off star (4.9 ± 0.4 M·), which is starting to fill its Roche lobe and is becoming distorted. Using 17 epochs of Very Large Telescope/Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer observations, we detected radial velocity variations exceeding 300 km s-1 associated with the target star, linked to the ellipsoidal variations measured by the fourth phase of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment in the optical bands. Under the assumption of a semidetached system, the simultaneous modelling of radial velocity and light curves constrains the orbital inclination of the binary to 38° ± 2°, resulting in a true mass of the unseen companion of 11.1 -2.4+2.1\M⊙. This represents the first direct dynamical detection of a black hole in a young massive cluster, opening up the possibility of studying the initial mass function and the early dynamical evolution of such compact objects in high-density environments.

SS, NB and ICZ acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council (ERC-CoG-646928, Multi-Pop). SK acknowledges funding from the UKRI in the form of a Future Leaders Fellowship (grant no. MR/T022868/1). CU acknowledges the support of the Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet. MG acknowledges support from the Ministry of Science and Innovation through a Europa Excelencia grant (EUR2020-112157). VHB acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through grant RGPIN-2020-05990.