First, take the case of a single star that formed billions of years ago from the gravitational accumulation of small particles of stuff, mostly hydrogen. (Creationists in the back of the room, please put your hands down and wait until I'm finished.) As gravity pulls the stuff together, it gets denser and hotter until thermonuclear reactions can take place. These reactions generate enough outward pressure to hold the core of the star stable against the force of gravity for billions of years.
As time goes on, the thermonuclear reactions create heavier nucleii out of the hydrogen. Eventually, the thermonuclear reactions use a lot of the hydrogen and the core gets denser and hotter still. Several things can happen at that point, depending on the mass of the star.
For really massive stars (20 times the mass of our sun or more), an explosion will occur that blows most of the mass away, leaving a dense core. If the core is less than about 1.4 solar masses, it becomes a dwarf star, gradually cooling off and getting dimmer. If the core is greater than 1.4 but less than about 3 solar masses, it becomes a neutron star. In a neutron star, the electrons and protons of atoms are squeezed together to become neutrons (releasing neutrinos). The resulting material, consisting only of crushed neutrons, is so dense that a matchbox full of it would have the same mass as a battleship. At that density, only quantum mechanical effects prevent further crushing by gravity.
Finally, if the remnant core has greater than 3 solar masses, even quantum mechanical forces can't overcome gravity and it becomes a black hole.
OK, now to the mystery here: In a binary system, there are two stars. The second star will suck a lot of the mass away from the first star during the long period of stellar evolution before the black hole forms. (Creationists, please keep still for a little while longer.) In order for the remnant to be 14 solar masses, the orginal star had to be maybe 100 solar masses or more before it blew up. But it's difficult for a star in a binary pair to be that large. Hence the mystery.
Now the creationists can have the floor (if they want it) to explain how the objects observed in the heavens can have been created in 5,000 years consistently with the observed laws of physics. No fair postulating that God started the universe off 5,000 years ago with the correct initial conditions to make it look billions of years old; that's cheating.
The fact that the companion star is feeding the black hole suggests that it is filling its own Roche lobe. As the black hole grows, the Roche lobe of the companion star is going to shrink, which means that more of the star will be available to the black hole. Over time a significant fraction of the star migrates to the black hole.
Anything obviously wrong with that model?
(I still don't understand the peculiar sentence in the article, BTW.)
No, it's not cheating. To the contrary, it's completely consistent with the basic premise of Creation itself, i.e., God creates a "finished product", such as Adam, for example.
Adam's body, created instantly, had "the correct initial conditions to make it look [tens] of years old". Adam had the appearance of an embryo that grew to a fetus, that grew to an infant, that grew to a child, that grew to an adolescent, that grew to an adult -- but, none of those stages earlier than the final adult condition occurred.
Creation is inherently the act of producing something with the appearance of having undergone a lengthy process, without it actually undergoing that process. To argue otherwise would be to argue that at most, God created "raw materials". Once one acknowledges Divine Creation of any entitity (world, solar system, human being, etc.), one acknowledges that God has created a finished product that has the appearance of something that had been around for a while. (Take a snapshot of the Solar System one microsecond after it's created. Plot the trajectories of the planets, then take the known data, and "run it backwards", and see what you get. What you'll get are tables of where each planet would have been at various points in time before they existed!)
"Cheating"? Harumph!
black holes are those floppy eliptical black disks that bugs bunny runs into when he is getting chased by elmer fudd