The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the first rogue black hole – a black hole all by itself – according to ANU astrophysicist and cosmologist Dr Brad Tucker.
“We know there are a bunch of small black holes that exist in our Milky Way,” he told Sky News Australia.
“But they’re obviously hard to see, we don’t really get an image of them directly, we can only see when black holes feed – these small black holes don’t.” Dr Tucker said the occurrence of rogue black holes is “more common” than has been previously measured and there may be “ten or 50 million” in the galaxy.
“Generally, we find them with other stars so we can kind of see their effects through gravity,” he said. “But when they’re by themselves, obviously there’s no real other way of finding it so this one was a bit of luck.”