Astronomers have discovered for the first time an isolated stellar-mass black hole rushing through the Milky Way at great speed.

Black holes are one of the most mysterious cosmic objects in the universe. And relatively recently, scientists have learned to detect them in outer space. That's just before scientists could find black holes only in the process of their merger, or at the expense of their "companions", which created X-rays.

And so scientists managed to detect a lonely “traveler” due to gravitational lensing. That's about this event and will be discussed in the material.

Photo by Sahu et al.

Who and how discovered a lonely black hole

This amazing find was made by Kailash Sahu (Institute for Space Studies) with his colleagues working with the Hubble Space Observatory. So a lone black hole was seen at a distance of 5000 light years from our Sun in the constellation of Sagittarius.

The whole uniqueness of this event lies in the fact that until now scientists have discovered black holes due to the so-called companion stars, they formed X-rays or by detecting gravitational waves that appeared during black hole mergers.

The same discovery was made by detecting gravitational lensing - the effect of curvature of the flow of light emanating from stars, which is located behind a black hole.

In order to detect these distortions, scientists observed the same sector of the night sky every six months for a long six years.

This is how a lonely black hole was discovered, and most remarkable, scientists have even established how fast it moves through the Milky Way.

It turned out that a lone black hole flies through space at a speed of about 162,000 kilometers per hour. Scientists have suggested that the object received such an acceleration in the process of the star's transformation into a supernova. And this supernova explosion created and accelerated the black hole.

The astronomer notes that the work done is important for the whole of astronomy. After all, now scientists will be able to perform a “complete census” of all black holes in the Milky Way.

The scientists shared the results of the work already done on the arXiv portal.

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