For the first time ever, NASA telescope measures mass of lone black hole roaming our galaxy

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has, for the first time, precisely measured an isolated black hole drifting through interstellar space, in our home galaxy - the Milky Way. The wandering black hole lies about 5,000 light-years away, in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of our galaxy.

Though an estimated 100 million isolated black holes, born from rare and monstrous stars that are at least 20 times more massive than our Sun, roam our galaxy, finding the telltale signature of one is a needle-in-haystack search for Hubble astronomers, NASA said in a statement on Friday.

The agency noted that until now, all black hole masses have been inferred statistically or through interactions in binary systems or in the cores of galaxies.

It's estimated that about 100 million black holes roam around our Milky Way Galaxy – and for the first time ever, astronomers now believe they may have precisely measured the mass of an isolated black hole with Hubble!Discover more: https://t.co/ls2R8dNjFX pic.twitter.com/IxZS21ZaeY

— Hubble (@NASAHubble) June 10, 2022

Two teams, one led by Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and the other by Casey Lam of the University of California, Berkeley, used Hubble data in their investigations. but Their results differ slightly, both suggest the presence of a compact object.

Sahu's team estimates that the black hole weighs seven solar masses while the Lam-led team reports a slightly lower mass range, meaning that the object may be either a neutron star or a black hole, and estimate that the mass of the invisible compact object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the Sun. At the high end of this range the object would be a black hole while at the low end, it would be a neutron star.

The Sahu-led team estimates the isolated black hole is travelling through space at 100,000 miles per hour, or 160,000 kilometres per hour (fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in less than three hours).

"Detections of isolated black holes will provide new insights into the population of these objects in our Milky Way," Sahu noted.