“Industrial-scale” Black Hole Selection without a Satellite
Abstract
Abstract The forthcoming GRAVITY+ instrument promises to usher in an era of “industrial-scale” mass measurements of isolated black holes (BHs), with the potential to assemble a sample of many tens of BHs via interferometric microlensing over several years. A key challenge will be selecting interferometric follow-up targets from a 1 order of magnitude larger pool of ongoing microlensing events when using traditional selection based on event timescale alone. A. Gould proposed a criterion optimized for BH selection using space-based microlens parallax measurements enabled by a satellite. We adapt it to work with microlens parallax constraints obtainable from ground-based data only. Using Galactic simulations, we show that our selection criterion is highly efficient, expecting to detect about a dozen BHs per year with GRAVITY+ from following up ∼35 selected events.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Relativity and Gravitational Theory
Cosmology and Gravitation Theories
Black Holes and Theoretical Physics
Publication details
- Journal / source
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Publisher
- American Astronomical Society
- Volume
- 997
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 63–63
- Publication date
- 14 January 2026
- Language
- EN