Revealing the companion of NGC 1850-BH1

Abstract

The nature of the system NGC 1850-BH1 is discussed controversially in the literature. Located in the young (100 Myr) massive cluster NGC 1850 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, it was initially proposed to consist of a 5 $M_\odot$ main sequence turn-off star orbiting a stellar-mass black hole. However, subsequent analyses of the system have presented an alternative explanation, comprising of a lower mass (1-2 $M_\odot$) puffed-up donor star orbiting a rapidly rotating mass accretor. Efforts to discern the secondary's nature as a luminous star or a compact object in the original spectroscopy have remained inconclusive. In this work, we analyse a set of follow-up multi-epoch FLAMES-ARGUS spectra, which are bluer and of higher spectral resolution than the original data. Exploiting the spectral disentangling technique, we reveal the luminous secondary, and constrain the parameters of both components. We can describe the system self-consistently, adopting a 1.7 $\pm$ 0.4 $M_\odot$ puffed-up mass donor and a rapidly rotating ($v\sin{i} = 275$ km/s) 5.2 $\pm$ 2.6 $M_\odot$ luminous companion. While this rules out the black hole hypothesis, tensions with the analysis of the original data remain: Our inferred flux ratio of $\sim$ 35-50% in the red optical wavelength range is higher than the 10% upper limit found in previous work. The origin of this discrepancy remains unclear. Thanks to its location in a cluster of well-known mass and metallicity and its peculiar orbital properties, NGC 1850-BH1 has the potential to serve as a benchmark for mass-transfer efficiency studies.