Milky Way: Find Evidence of a Lonely Black Hole

Astronomers are convinced that the death of large stars brings black holes. So at this point the Milky Way should be populated by hundreds of millions of black holes. The most difficult to detect are isolated black holes, because they are invisible.

A study group of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, has made the first discovery of a black hole And lonely Well, he used the light from a star behind an invisible object. That light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field. Then deflected towards the Hubble telescope using the phenomenon of gravity microlensing

The research team estimated that the mass of the invisible object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun. Other researchers think the object is a neutron star This was considered due to the fact that a black hole made from a dead star must be at least equal to 2.2 times that of the Sun. In short, whether the object is a black hole or a neutron star, it is still a “ghost star” wandering alone through the galaxy.

For the first time, we were able to identify a lone, compact and practically invisible object through microlensing. In addition, we were also able to determine what the mass is. I think with this work we’ve opened a new window to look for similar objects that can’t be seen any other way.

Jessica Lu from the research team

Astronomers will have to determine how many such objects populate our galaxy. Only in this way will they understand betterevolution of the stars and their death. In addition, they will be able to know whether some of the invisible black holes are primordial. Perhaps they might be one of the things that some cosmologists believe were created in large numbers after the Big Bang.