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February 5, 2022 06:34 pm

Astronomers Find First Ever Rogue Black Hole Adrift In the Milky Way

Scientific American reports:These are boom times for astronomers hunting black holes. The biggest ones — supermassive black holes that can weigh billions of suns — have been found at the centers of most every galaxy, and we have even managed to image one. Meanwhile, researchers now routinely detect gravitational waves rippling through the universe from smaller merging black holes. Closer to home, we have witnessed the dramatic celestial fireworks produced when the Milky Way's own supermassive black hole and its more diminutive cousins feed on gas clouds or even entire stars. Never before, though, have we seen a long-predicted phenomenon: an isolated black hole drifting aimlessly through space, born and flung out from the collapsing core of a massive star. Until now. Scientists have announced the first-ever unambiguous discovery of a free-floating black hole, a rogue wanderer in the void some 5,000 light-years from Earth. The result, which appeared January 31 on the arXiv preprint server but has not yet been peer-reviewed, represents the culmination of more than a decade of ardent searching. "It's super exciting," says Marina Rejkuba from the European Southern Observatory in Germany, a co-author on the paper. "We can actually prove that isolated black holes are there." This discovery may be just the start; ongoing surveys and upcoming missions are expected to find dozens or even hundreds more of the dark, lonely travelers. "It's the tip of the iceberg," says Kareem El-Badry from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was not involved in the paper.... The odds of seeing such an event for an isolated black hole were slim, but given that millions of stellar-mass black holes are predicted to be drifting through our galaxy, some might turn up in sufficiently broad and deep surveys of the sky.... This black hole's mass offers further evidence that astrophysicists' formation models are correct — that solitary black holes can rise from the ashes of especially hefty stellar progenitors.... Rogue stellar-mass black holes, long predicted but only now observationally confirmed, might well be sufficiently common in our galaxy to support demographic studies of their population. Pinning down their true abundance, masses and other properties could shore up our still-incomplete theories of stellar evolution — or reveal important new gaps in our understanding. "If confirmed, this is a very exciting discovery!" adds the astronomy column at Syfy.com. "We know those black holes are out there, and this research points to how we can find them." The precise astrometry was partly performed using the Hubble Space Telescope over a six-year interval, according to the research paper (shared by Slashdot reader Obipale).

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