The first detection of a black hole in the sky got important validation.
A second team of scientists, conducting a separate, independent analysis, has reached almost the same conclusion as the first one.
The new work has arrived at a slightly different conclusion than the previous one. According to the new study, the object may be a neutron star, rather than a black hole.
Either way, this means that we may have a new tool for searching for 'dark', compact objects that are otherwise invisible in our galaxy, by measuring the way their gravity warps and distorts the light of distant stars as they pass in front of them.
Lu says that this is the first free-floating black hole.
Microlensing allows us to weigh the lonely, compact objects. I believe we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can't be seen without them.
It is thought that black holes are the collapsed cores of massive stars that have reached the end of their lives. The black holes are thought to live relatively short lives.
There should be as many as 10 million to 1 billion stellar-mass black holes in the universe.
Black holes are named for a reason. Unless material is falling onto them, they emit no light that we can see. We can't detect a black hole if it's just hanging out and doing nothing.
It was almost done. Any light that travels through a black hole is warped by the extreme gravity of the hole. We might see a distant star appear brighter and in a different position than usual.
That happened on June 2nd, 2011. An event that peaked on July 20 was recorded by two separate surveys.
Scientists were able to see the event because it was long and bright.
The amount of time the event lasts is a sign of how big the foreground lens is.
Black holes can be the cause of long events. The duration of the brightening episode is dependent on how fast the foreground lens and background star are moving relative to each other and how big the foreground lens is.
We can confirm that the foreground lens is a black hole by measuring the position of the star behind it.
The illustration shows how Hubble looks at something. Joseph Olmsted is an astronomer.
The Hubble Space Telescope was used for eight separate observations of the region.
The culprit was a black hole that was at least 7 times the mass of the Sun and was located at a distance of 5,153 light years away.
More data from Hubble has been added by Lu and Lam. The object is between 1.6 and 4.2 times the mass of the Sun.
It's possible that the object is a star. The collapsed core of a massive star was between 8 and 30 times the mass of the sun.
The object is supported by something called neutron degeneracy pressure, which prevents it from collapsing into a black hole. The object has a mass limit of more than 2.5 times the Sun's.
No black holes have been found below the mass of the Sun. The lower mass gap is called it. We could have the detection of a lower mass gap object on our hands if the work of the team is correct.
The two teams came back with different results for the relative motions of the object and the star.
Sahu and his team found that the object is moving at a high rate of speed due to the fact that a supernova explosion can cause it to collapse.
30 kilometers per second was the average for the group. The result suggests that a black hole might not need a supernova explosion.
Astronomers expect to learn a lot from the discovery of more of these objects in the future, but right now it's not possible to say which estimate is correct.
The object is the first dark stellar remnant discovered wandering through the galaxy alone.
The research can be found on arXiv.
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