BLACK HOLE LOST IN SPACE

This black hole is wandering erratically in space. It’s so swift it can travel from Earth to Moon in 3 hours.

Nearly a month after the Event Horizon Telescope snapped the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have found a unique object in the cosmos — a free- floating black hole. Astronomers using gravitational microlensing spotted the splendor wandering in deep space.

Gravitational microlensing is a process where astronomers observe the light from a star far behind the black hole, which is shortly cheered and veered by an object passing in front of it. The object is the black hole. Astronomers from UC Berkeley estimate that the mass of the unnoticeable compact object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun.

The findings are set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Astronomers presume that the object could be a neutron star rather than a black hole. Neutron stars are thick, largely compact objects, but their graveness is balanced by internal neutron pressure, which prevents the further collapse of a black hole.

“This is the first free-floating black hole or neutron star discovered through gravitational microlensing. With microlensing, we’re able to probe these lonely, compact objects and weigh them. I think we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can’t be seen any other way,” Jessica Lu, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy, and lead author said in a statement.

The wandering black hole lies about light- times down, in the Carina- Sagittarius helical arm of our world. still, its discovery allows astronomers to estimate that the nearest insulated astral-mass black hole to Earth might be as close as 80 light-times down.

While the Berkley platoon observed the microlensing event, so did a platoon of astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute( STScI) in Baltimore. A paper describing the analysis by the STScI platoon, led by Kailash Sahu, has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Sahu’s platoon estimates the insulated black hole is traveling across the world at kilometers( presto enough to travel from Earth to the Moon is lower than three hours). That is faster than the utmost of the other neighboring stars in that region of our world.

And since both microlensing checks caught the same object, it has two names MOA-2011-BLG-191 and OGLE-2011-BLG-0462, or OB110462, for short. “Whatever it is, the object is the first dark stellar remnant discovered wandering through the galaxy unaccompanied by another star,” Lam added.

Astronomers used the Hubble telescope to measure the quantum of deviation of the background star’s image by the black hole. “Detections of isolated black holes will provide new insights into the population of these objects in our Milky Way,” said Sahu.

Image credits : ESA Hubble

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