The Milky Way galaxy is haunted. The vast gulf of space between the stars is plied by the dead, burned-out, and crushed remnants of once-glorious stars. Black holes cannot be directly seen because their intense gravity swallows light. Their presence can only be deduced by seeing how they affect the environment around them.
That only begins to describe the infinite density locked away into a black hole left over from a supernova. The black hole is typically several times the mass of our Sun. The intense gravity from something so dense warps the fabric of space around it. Starlight passing near this gravitational pothole in space is deflected. And this is how the phantom black holes are found.
There should be 100 million black holes roaming among the 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. since black holes have no light of their own, it's extremely difficult to detect black holes.
If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leaves behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, that isolated black holes are invisible.
Astronomers have at last come up with clear evidence for finding one in a needle-in-a-haystack search along with a blizzard of stars seen toward the galactic center.
The light from a star far behind the black hole was momentarily brightened and deflected by the black hole passing in front of it. This was a long and painstaking measurement that the Hubble Space Telescope's exquisite resolution is well-suited for. The black hole's powerful gravitation(gravitational microlensing) left a unique fingerprint on the deflection of starlight, eliminating other potential gravitational lensing candidates. - Media
No need for us to worry because the black hole is 5,000 light-years(4700 trillion kilometers) away.
Hubble's measurement of the Deflection of starlight by a foreground black hole.
Illustration of an isolated black hole.
Comments
Post a Comment