University of California at Berkeley scientists may have identified a free-floating black hole roaming the galaxy about 2,200 to 6,200 light-years from earth.
The international team, led by UC Berkeley associate professor Jessica Lu and graduate student Casey Lam, discovered the lone black hole using a method known as gravitational microlensing.
"As much as we would like to say it is definitively a black hole, we must report all allowed solutions. This includes both lower mass black holes and possibly even a neutron star," Lu said. Black holes are widely thought to be the leftover remnants following the death of a star. Their gravitational pull is so strong that it warps spacetime and their presence can only be deduced through microlensing events where they distort the light of distant background stars, according to NASA. Prolonged microlensing events that capture the changing brightness of stars for over 200 days indicate the gravitational influence of a black hole.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope first monitored the dramatic brightening of a star in August 2011, which exposed the foreground black hole that later became the subject of Lu's research in 2020. It took one year for the star to dim back to normal, which is"amazingly long" according to Lu. The UC Berkeley-led team is not the only one to observe OB110462. A competing research team from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore has also been analyzing this stellar occurrence.
New data from Hubble showed that the effects of OB110462 on its neighboring star are still observable even 10 years after the event. Through an analysis of this data, the UC Berkeley team has confirmed OB110462's likely status as a lone roaming black hole.
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