Searching for Black Hole Candidates in Stellar Systems through the analysis of the light-travel time effect of close binary stars

S.B. QIAN; L. Y. ZHU; W. P. LIAO; J. J. HE; L. LIU; E. FERNÁNDEZ-LAJÚS

Río de Janeiro, Brasil

Simposio; IAU Symp. 267: Co-Evolution on Central Black Holes and Galaxies; 2009

IAU XXVII General Assembly

Several massive stellar black hole candidates have been discovered recently (e.g. Greiner et al. 2001 and Orosz 2007), but all the candidates are found to be a component  in a binary system. Observationally, the variations of the orbital period of an eclipsing binary can in principle be determined  by analyzing the observed-calculated (O-C) diagram (constructed by the obesrved tiems of light minimum minus the ones calculated with a given linear ephemeris). If there is a tertiary companion orbiting an eclipsing binary, the wobble of the binary´s barycentre will cause the orbital period and thus the O-C diagram to show a cyclic change. Therefore, tha analysis of the O-C diagram provided a potential method to search for unseen objects (including the black holes candidates) in eclipsing binary systems. In this contribution, we  report two possibilities for the detecting of two massive black hole candidates in two close binary stars,  i.e., V Pup and SS Cam.