For the first time ever, astronomers have seen an isolated black hole, wandering unattached across the Milky Way
Solo black holes are thought to be common, forming whenever a single star of more than 20 solar masses or so reaches the end of its life. “There should be 100 million such black holes in the galaxy, they should be everywhere, but it’s very hard to find them,” says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the team that made the discovery.
So the team selected eight candidates objects, which produced no light of their own but brightened a background star for at least 200 days, for further observations. They now have enough data to claim that one is a black hole. The detection is much more convincing than previous claims of lone black holes, agrees Eric Agol, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, who 20 years ago was among the researchers who proposed the combination of brightening and deflection techniques used by the teamFinally, extra information came from ground observatories that saw the brightening event.
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