Hunting black holes in the Tarantula nebula

Black holes have long been among the most exotic objects studied in astronomy. They come in a wide variety, such as isolated black holes roaming freely, supermassive black holes at centres of galaxies, and black holes residing in binary systems with a star or another black hole. Each of these can give us insights into how they come to form and what their eventual fate will be.

In this talk, I will focus on black holes in binary systems with a stellar companion. A major channel to form such black holes is from massive binary systems, where the more massive star collapses into a black hole resulting in its current appearance. Such systems can serve as anchor points to understand the evolution of massive binary stars and formation of binary black holes that we now detect with gravitational waves. 

To search for these systems, we take a trip to the Tarantula nebula, an active starburst region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. I will discuss how the Very Large Telescope in Chile enables us to discover and characterize massive binary systems hiding black holes within.