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Gpu benchmark software12/19/2023 ![]() Lam’s team reports a slightly lower mass range, meaning that the object may be either a neutron star or a black hole. ![]() The amount of deflection by the black hole’s intense warping of space allowed Sahu’s team to estimate that it weighs seven solar masses. This astrometric microlensing technique provided information on the mass, distance, and velocity of the black hole. That’s equivalent to measuring the height of an adult human lying on the surface of the moon from the Earth. The star’s image was offset from where it normally would be by about a milliarcsecond. Hubble is capable of the extraordinary precision needed for such measurements. Next, Hubble was used to measure the amount of deflection of the background star’s image by the black hole. ![]() But no color change was seen in the black hole event. Also, if the intervening object was instead a foreground star, it would cause a transient color change in the starlight as measured because the light from the foreground and background stars would momentarily be blended together. The very intense gravity of the black hole will stretch out the duration of the lensing event for over 200 days. The signature of a foreground black hole stands out as unique among other microlensing events. Astronomers use the phenomenon, called gravitational microlensing, to study stars and exoplanets in the approximately 30,000 events seen so far inside our galaxy. The warping of space due to the gravity of a foreground object passing in front of a star located far behind it will momentarily bend and amplify the light of the background star as it passes in front of it. The teams’ results differ slightly, but both suggest the presence of a compact object. Two teams used Hubble data in their investigations - one led by Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland and the other by Casey Lam of the University of California, Berkeley. Then Hubble follows up on the most interesting such events. Ground-based telescopes, which monitor the brightness of millions of stars in the rich star fields toward the central bulge of our Milky Way, look for a tell-tale sudden brightening of one of them when a massive object passes between us and the star. However, a black hole warps space, which then deflects and amplifies starlight from anything that momentarily lines up exactly behind it. Telescopes can’t photograph a wayward black hole because it doesn’t emit any light. Because the self-detonation is not perfectly symmetrical, the black hole may get a kick, and go careening through our galaxy like a blasted cannonball. These stars explode as supernovae, and the remnant core is crushed by gravity into a black hole. The nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is a little over 4 light-years away.īlack holes roaming our galaxy are born from rare, monstrous stars (less than one-thousandth of the galaxy’s stellar population) that are at least 20 times more massive than our Sun. However, its discovery allows astronomers to estimate that the nearest isolated stellar-mass black hole to Earth might be as close as 80 light-years away. The newly detected wandering black hole lies about 5,000 light-years away, in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of our galaxy. ![]() Stellar-mass black holes are usually found with companion stars, making this one unusual. Until now, all black hole masses have been inferred statistically or through interactions in binary systems or in the cores of galaxies. Following six years of meticulous observations, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has, for the first time ever, provided direct evidence for a lone black hole drifting through interstellar space by a precise mass measurement of the phantom object. Astronomers estimate that 100 million black holes roam among the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but they have never conclusively identified an isolated black hole.Hubble determines mass of isolated black hole roaming our Milky Way
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