Scientists left baffled after discovering lone black hole floating through space

Scientists have been left stunned after stumbling across a lone black hole drifting through space.

It's not every day astronomers come across an isolated black mass roaming the Milky Way. In fact, it's a 'one in a million' chance, despite being seven times larger than Earth's sun.

The 'Galactic bulge' is also usually completely invisible to both eye and lens, since black holes absorb any light that falls over them.

Black holes are the compact remains of exploded stars which are so dense that its gravity stops anything, even light, from escaping its singularity.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking had a better explanation for how black holes essentially suck the life out of anything that comes in its path, writing in his novel that they cause 'spaghettification'.

It's the first to be found from the telescope (Getty Images)

The British professor explained how anything that gets too close to a black hole is distorted into a long, thin shape as a result of its gravitational pull.

Anyway, for decades astronomers have only been able to guestimate where they are based on the way gravity stretches spacetime and bends the light from distant stars.

Yet for the first time in history, scientists believe they have spotted a black hole based on deflections of a source star, though no star orbits it.

According to the group of researchers from the American Astronomical Society who published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal, a lonely black hole was seen from a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) as early as 2011.

NASA found a supermassive black hole in Sagittarius (NASA Via Getty Images)

Over the course of a six-year period, the team monitored the segment of sky to watch stars were being abnormally moved from their positions, hinting at a hidden object causing havoc under a cloak of invisibility.

The researchers say the mysterious void is around 5,000 light years from our home planet in the constellation of Sagittarius, reports Science News, and is actually much closer to us than the other ginormous one in the Milky Way's center at around 27,000 light years away.

Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said it's 'the only one so far.'

The news comes as Sahu and his colleagues discovered the looming mass coursing through the constellation in 2022 but a second team refuted the claim, saying the body could've been a neutron star.

Speaking at the time, researcher Dr Martin Dominik of the University of St Andrews, said: "Einstein did it again - black holes make themselves invisible, but they cannot hide their gravity," as per The Daily Mail.

Stephen Hawking made significant contributions to the study of black holes (Getty Images)

Now, the new observations from the HST confirm that the mass is so large that is must be a black hole.

While singular black holes are probably frequent, with theoretical estimates suggesting there could be up to 100 million black holes hidden among the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, they are difficult to find.

This is largely because it's rare for them to line up with a large star, which reveals their presence.

But in this case, the hole in Sagittarius became exposed when it passed in front of a dim star, magnifying its brightness and slowly shifting its position as a consequence of the black hole's gravity.

“It takes a long time to do the observations,” Sahu added. “Everything is improved if you have a longer baseline and more observations.”

The scientist hopes to find even more black holes with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which is scheduled to launch in 2027.