Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com November 27 news, during the Black Friday carnival season, NASA did a little work for everyone. The Hubble Space Telescope has found evidence of a "lonely black hole" roaming around the Milky way.

Scientists estimate that there are about 100 million such black holes drifting in our Milky way, but in fact they have never really come up with conclusive evidence before. After nearly six years of careful observation, the Hubble Space Telescope has proved for the first time a "lonely black hole" drifting in interstellar space through accurate mass measurements of phantom objects.

It is reported that the masses of all black holes are inferred by statistics or through the interaction of binary systems or galactic cores. The newly discovered "wandering black hole" is located about 5000 light-years away in the spiral arm of the constellation Sagittarius.

Astronomers estimate that the nearest isolated black hole with stellar mass may be 80 light-years away. For reference, the nearest star in the solar system, Proxima (Proxima Centauri), is a little more than 4 light-years away.

The black hole roaming the banking system was born from a rare, giant star (less than 1/1000 of the total number of stars in the Milky way), but these stars can be at least 20 times the mass of our sun. These stars eventually turn into supernova explosions, and the remaining cores are squeezed by gravity to become black holes. But because the explosion is not completely symmetrical, the black hole may start crashing through such a large galaxy as if it had been kicked.

But it is a pity that human telescopes cannot capture such an unstable black hole. After all, it does not emit any light, but fortunately, the black hole is not impossible to observe, because it distorts space and then deflects and magnifies the starlight behind it. So it also looks obvious in the eyes of people who observe the outside world through light.

When a foreground object passes in front of a star far behind it, the space distortion caused by its gravity causes the light of the background star to bend and magnify instantly. Astronomers are also using this phenomenon, known as the "gravitational lens", to study about 30,000 stars and exoplanets observed so far in the Milky way.

Then, after a long-term observation, Hubble found that the image of the star deviated from its normal position by about a millisecond (corner seconds is 1/60 of the corner, which is about the same as measuring the diameter of a 25-cent coin placed in New York in Los Angeles).

The team estimates that the isolated black hole is crossing the Milky way at 100000 miles per hour or 160000 kilometers per hour (it can travel from Earth to the moon in less than three hours). This is faster than most other neighboring stars in that region of our Milky way.

"Astrometry is conceptually simple, but very difficult to observe," Sahu said. "gravitational lenses are the only technology that can be used to identify isolated black holes." When a black hole passes in front of a star in a galaxy 19000 light-years away, the light flying toward Earth is magnified for 270 days as the black hole passes by. However, Hubble spent several years observing how the light of the background star is affected by the foreground black hole. "

In fact, the existence of stellar mass black holes has been known since the early 1970s, but so far, all measurements of their masses have been based on binary systems. To put it simply, the gas from its companion star falls into the black hole and is heated to exaggerated temperatures, emitting X-rays. As a result, the masses of about 24 black holes have been measured by X-ray binaries. The mass is estimated to be between 5 and 20 solar masses.

According to reports, NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will discover thousands of gravitational lens events, many of which have been considered black holes.

CTOnews.com learned that in a 1916 paper on general relativity, Einstein predicted that his theory could be verified by observing the apparent position of the background star offset by the sun's gravity. A collaborative team led by astronomers Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson tested this during the solar eclipse on May 29, 1919.

Eddington and his colleagues confirmed Einstein's theory by measuring that a background star was offset by 20 seconds. I don't think these scientists could have imagined that their descendants would be able to use the same technology to find black holes in the Milky way more than a century later.

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