There is an estimated 100 million black holes scattered across the stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but the Hubble Space Telescope has managed to provide direct evidence of a lone black hole drifting through interstellar space for the very first time. After six years of meticulous observations, this evidence came in the form of a precise mass measurement of the phantom object.
This wandering black hole is located approximately 5,000 light-years away in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way. Thanks to this discovery, astronomers now estimate that the nearest isolated stellar-mass black hole to Earth might be as close as 80 light-years away. For comparison, the nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is just over 4 light-years away. We may be just decades away from actually visiting a black hole, like this one with huge rings surrounding it.
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As much as we would like to say it is definitively a black hole, we must report all allowed solutions. This includes both lower mass black holes and possibly even a neutron star. Whatever it is, the object is the first dark stellar remnant discovered wandering through the galaxy, unaccompanied by another star,” said Jessica Lu of the Berkeley team.
