![]() ![]() However, for the same reason a black hole doesn't emit light – its extremely powerful gravitational field doesn't let light escape – we can see the evidence of a black hole by how it warps space and deflects and amplifies starlight from any star that lines up exactly behind it relative to the point of observation. The primary reason is that they don't emit any light. We know that there are potentially tens of millions of black holes in our galaxy, but they are challenging to observe. Self-detonation isn't perfectly symmetrical, so a black hole could be shot off into a different direction, 'careening through our galaxy like a blasted cannonball.' Less than one-thousandth of the galaxy's stars are large enough for this to occur. For reference, the nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is slightly more than 4 light-years away.īlack holes scattered throughout our galaxy are formed when 'rare, monstrous' stars at least 20 times more massive than our Sun explode into supernovae, leaving behind a remnant core crushed by gravity into a black hole. The discovery of this distant black hole allows astronomers to estimate that there may be an isolated stellar-mass black hole much nearer to Earth, perhaps only 80 light-years away. The detected black hole is about 5,000 light-years away, wandering in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Finally, after six years of 'meticulous observations,' NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has ' provided direct evidence for a lone black hole drifting through interstellar space by a precise mass measurement of the phantom object.' This is a major milestone, as previously, all black hole masses have only been inferred statistically or 'through interactions in binary systems or in the cores of galaxies.' Stellar-mass black holes are typically found with companion stars, making the observed isolated black hole a special case. Despite the many theorized black holes, it's been a struggle for scientists to identify an isolated black hole. Astronomers believe there could be as many as 100 million black holes among the stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. ![]()
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