arxiv.org
July 2022 • K. C. Sahu, Jay Anderson, Stefano Casertano, Howard E. Bond, A. Udalski, M. Dominik, A. Calamida, Andrea Bellini, T. M. Brown, M. Rejkuba, Varun Baja…
We report the first unambiguous detection and mass measurement of an isolated stellar-mass black hole (BH). We used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to carry out precise astrometry of the source star of the long-duration (tE ≃ 270 days), high-magnification microlensing event MOA-2011-BLG-191/OGLE-2011-BLG-0462 (hereafter designated as MOA-11-191/OGLE-11-462), in the direction of the Galactic bulge. HST imaging, conducted at eight epochs over an interval of 6 yr, reveals a clear relativistic astrometric deflection …