An international team of astronomers has managed to detect a single “isolated” black hole that wanders through interstellar space at less than 5,162 light years away in the constellation of Sagittarius; said discovery has been announced on the preprint server arXiv.
Detecting black holes alone from Earth is for many an almost impossible task. impossible. And it is that unless they manage to trap some passing matter in their gravitational field, they are basically invisible.
The largest zoom ever made on the stars around the Milky Way’s giant black hole captured from a ground-based telescope. #space #space
— AstroAventura (@AstroAventura) February 9, 550
Thus, black holes can only be seen when they interact with others objects and observe their effects on the surrounding space, such as companion stars. The gravitational field of a black hole is so extreme that it warps and twists any light that can travel through it.
How did they manage to give with the black hole?
To find the elusive black hole, the researchers resorted to a technique known as “astrometric microlensing”, which uses the fact that a mass moving through space can act as a gravitational lens.
This lens distorts both the brightness and, above all, the apparent position of the stars along the observer’s line of sight beyond own mass.
Previous microlensing events have allowed the detection of exoplanets and stars too faint to see.
To confirm the presence of the hole black, astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and several ground-based observatories. Reaching their discovery took ten years of observations.
According to experts, the discovery could contribute to a complete census of the population of black holes and to the understanding of the formation and evolution of holes stellar mass blacks.
Isolated black holes exist
“Now we know that isolated black holes exist Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the team that made the discovery, told Space.com. “And they have masses similar to black holes found in binaries. And there must be many out there.”
“If you can detect and measure the bending of light caused by these massive objects, it is possible to detect them and measure their masses,” said Sahu.
As reported by the scientific media, the researchers estimated that this isolated black hole had a mass 7.1 times greater than that of the Sun. They also discovered that this black hole is moving at a speed of 162,000 km /h. This suggests that this black hole may have received a “kick” from the supernova explosion that gave rise to it.
With information from DW.
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