Tuesday, October 8, 2024

First direct evidence of an isolated black hole

Date:

After six years of observation, the space telescope Hubble NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) managed to find First live test of having a lone black holewho wanders among the stars Milky Way: He actually measured accurately Masswhich is equal to Seven times the sun. a Unique result, given that until now the mass of these black holes has always been inferred by statistical methods or by studying their interactions with companion stars within binary systems. The result is the collection of Kailash Sahu, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Astronomy scientists they can that there are 100 Millions of black holes wander among the stars of the Milky Way, but so far they have not recognized any isolated people. The person Hubble found around 5000 light years Us, in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of our galaxy. Its discovery allowed researchers to estimate that the nearest single stellar-mass black hole could exist 80 light years (By comparison, the closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is just over four light-years away.)

Calculations made by Chasso’s team indicate that the black hole is moving in galaxy A . 160,000 kilometers per hour: a higher speed than most neighboring stars, allowing us to travel from Earth to the Moon in less than three hours.

According to a second research group, led by Casey Lamm of the University of California, Berkeley, it cannot be ruled out that the final object in the Hubble viewfinder is not a black hole but a black hole. neutron star (In fact, their calculations show a smaller mass, between 1.6 and 4.4 times the mass of the Sun.) “Whatever – defines L – object is The first remnants of a dark star which was discovered wandering the galaxy unaccompanied by another star.”

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