The isolated stellar-mass black hole is the first of its kind ever detected, scientists say.
"We now know that isolated black holes exist," Sahu said."And they have masses similar to the black holes found in binaries. And there must be lots of them out there."
The key behind this discovery is how powerful gravitational fields, such as those belonging to black holes, warp the fabric of space and time. As such, they can act like magnifying glasses, a phenomenon known as""If one can detect and measure the bending of light caused by these massive objects, it's possible to detect them and measure their masses," Sahu said.
The greater the mass of a gravitational lensing object, the longer the resulting brightening. Since a black hole is expected to be massive, its microlensing event is expected to have a long duration."Also, a black hole is expected to be dark," Sahu explained."So we use these two as our main criteria — the event should have a long duration, and the lens should not be emitting any light.
However, small-mass stars that move slowly in the sky may also look relatively dark and generate long-duration gravitational lensing events. One way to distinguish an isolated black hole from a small-mass star is the fact that a black hole will deflect the light from background stars"enough that it can be measured with Hubble," Sahu said."If the Hubble observations show large deflection but no light from the lens, then it would be a black hole.
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