In a collaboration born from overlapping terms in the School of Natural Sciences, Elena Murchikova, Member (2018–22) and frequent Visitor, and Kailash Sahu, Member (2022–23), have challenged prevailing assumptions about the visibility of isolated black holes.
Their research centers on the question of whether stellar mass black holes—long thought to be very difficult to detect outside of binary pairs—can in fact be observed through the light they emit while they plow through interstellar gas.
In a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Murchikova and Sahu demonstrated, by generating synthetic spectra and comparing them with current observational capabilities, that light emissions from solitary black holes are within reach of modern telescopes, particularly for those in dense environments or near our solar neighborhood.
Their findings reframe the search for black holes: the challenge is not whether these black holes can be seen, but whether we can identify them.
