Astronomers may have for the first time detected and measured the mass of an isolated stellar-mass black hole, a new study finds.
Previous research suggested that when giant stars more than 20 times the mass reach the end of their lives, they usually die in catastrophic explosions known as supernovas, and their dense cores are expected to collapse to become black holes.
Stars big enough to create black holes are estimated to make up about one out of a thousand stars, suggesting that in the Milky Way, "there should be about 100 million stellar-mass black holes," study lead author Kailash Sahu, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, told Space.com.
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