Astronomers have discovered black holes ranging from a few times the Sun’s mass to tens of billions. Now a group of scientists has predicted that NASA’s Nancy
Grace Roman Space Telescope could find a class of “featherweight” black holes that has so far eluded detection.
But there’s a minimum mass required: at least eight times that of our Sun. Lighter stars will either become Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes can slowly shrink as radiation escapes. The slow leak of what’s now known as Hawking radiation would, over time, cause the black hole to simply evaporate. This infographic shows the estimated lifetimes and event horizon –– the point past which infalling objects can’t escape a black hole’s gravitational grip –– diameters for black holes of various small masses.Observations have already revealed clues that such objects may be lurking in our galaxy.
“There’s no way to tell between Earth-mass black holes and rogue planets on a case-by-case basis,” DeRocco said. But scientists expect Roman to find 10 times as many objects in this mass range than ground-based telescopes. “Roman will be extremely powerful in differentiating between the two statistically.”
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