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.
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.
Several projects now search for these and other so-called microlensing events, including the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment , run by the University of Warsaw in Poland, and the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics survey run by researchers in New Zealand and Japan. In June 2011, these two surveys spotted something of note: A suddenly brightening star 20,000 light-years away towards the densely packed galactic bulge in the center of the Milky Way.
The amount of lensing and deflection of light from the star then allowed Sahu and his collaborators to peg the suspected black hole’s mass at just over seven solar masses. That places it “smack in the middle” of what we would expect for stellar-mass black holes, Özel says. The team was also able to calculate its speed. “It’s moving at about 45 kilometers per second,” Sahu says.
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