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It’s about 28,000 light-years away.īy the way, the EHT images don’t show the black holes themselves. Then, just last month (May 2022), astronomers with the EHT announced the first-ever direct image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The first, announced in 2019, shows the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, some 55 million light-years from Earth.

In recent years, astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope ( EHT) have also begun to acquire images of supermassive black holes. It’s this accretion disk that astronomers typically see when studying stellar-mass black holes. The black holes pull matter from their companion stars, and the incoming matter forms a disk around the black hole. The stellar-mass black holes discovered in the galaxy before this one are all only noticeable because they’re in binary systems. Some ways of detecting black holesīecause black holes cast no light of their own, astronomers typically hunt for their effect on visible matter. 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.īy comparison, the nearest “living” star is Proxima Centauri, and it is 4 light-years away from Earth. The newly detected wandering black hole lies about 5,000 light-years away, in the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm of our galaxy. The astronomers aren’t sure exactly how far away this black hole might be. Stellar-mass black holes are usually found with companion stars, making this one unusual.Īstronomers believe the object is the first dark stellar remnant discovered wandering through our galaxy, unaccompanied by another star. Until now, all black hole masses have been inferred statistically, or through interactions in binary systems or in the cores of galaxies. – which announced the news on Friday, J– said:įollowing six years of meticulous observations, the 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. And now scientists have captured imagery revealing what appears to be one of these cosmic zombies, as it crossed paths with a more distant star. Seen! Lone black hole roaming the galaxyĪstronomers estimate there are 100 million “wandering stellar corpses” – black holes cast into space by the explosions that made them – lurking among the 100 billion stars of our Milky Way galaxy. The black hole distorts the space around it, which warps images of background stars lined up almost directly behind it. The black hole traps light due to its intense gravitational field. The surviving core is several times the mass of our sun. The black hole is the crushed remnant of a massive star that exploded as a supernova. Artist’s concept of a lone black hole drifting through our Milky Way galaxy.