The quest for collapsed/frozen stars in single-line spectroscopic binary systems

TL;DR

This paper explores the search for collapsed or frozen stars, such as black holes, within single-line spectroscopic binary systems, highlighting historical efforts and the challenges faced in their detection.

Contribution

It reviews past methods and attempts to identify black hole candidates in spectroscopic binaries, emphasizing the difficulties and historical context of such searches.

Findings

Historical searches for black holes in binaries

Challenges in identifying collapsed stars

Role of spectroscopic binary observations

Abstract

Black holes are now commonplace, among the stars, in Galactic centers, and perhaps other places. But within living memory, their very existence was doubted by many, and few chose to look for them. Zeldovich and Guseinov were first, followed by Trimble and Thorne, using a method that would have identified HDE 226868 as a plausible candidate, if it had been in the 1968 catalogue of spectroscopic binaries. That it was not arose from an unhappy accident in the observing program of Daniel M. Popper long before the discovery of X-ray binaries and the identification of Cygnus X-1 with that hot, massive star and its collapsed companion.