Discover the first roaming black hole in our galaxy – RT World News

[ad_1]

Astronomers say that the black hole is invisible, so they had to study its effect on the light that travels through the surrounding space

Astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, have published a study, claiming to have identified a wandering black hole in the Milky Way for the first time. Kailash Sahu, who led the research, reports that his team has made “the first unambiguous mass discovery and measurement of an isolated stellar-mass black hole.”

The study has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, and is also available for peer review on the arXiv server before printing.

The celestial body is said to be traveling at about 45 kilometers (28 miles) per second and located about 5,200 light-years from Earth. Scientists believe that the black hole was pushed into space when its star exploded – hence the unusually high speed of an object of its kind.

The discovery was made with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, and it dates back to 2011.

Black holes cannot be detected directly because they are invisible. However, astronomers study the gravitational effect of black holes on the space around them.

In the case of the recently discovered wandering black hole, the researchers observed light from a distant star transmitted through the black hole’s gravitational field. Astronomers say they’ve noticed how the light distorts and gets brighter for no apparent reason — something that convinced the team that it passes through the black hole’s gravitational field.

In fact, the phenomenon in which a gravitational field causes spacetime to bend – known as a gravitational microlensing – has been used before to identify distant celestial objects.

The discovery of the floating black hole began in June 2011, when both separate microlensing surveys – the Optical Gravitational Lens Experiment (OGLE) and Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) – detected an event that culminated on July 20.

The scene, later dubbed MOA-2011-BLG-191/OGLE-2011-BLG-0462, ended with a total of 270 days. Researchers continued observations with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope until 2017.

Then the team of astronomers analyzed the data they collected, finally concluding that the celestial body in question was most likely a black hole, not a star. They even managed to calculate its approximate mass – 7.1 times the mass of the Sun.

You can share this story on social media:

Follow RT on

[ad_2]