“Industrial-Scale” Black Hole Selection without a Satellite

Kavli Affiliate: Subo Dong

| First 5 Authors: Zexuan Wu, Zexuan Wu, , ,

| Summary:

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 an order-of-magnitude larger pool of
ongoing microlensing events when using traditional selection based on event
timescale alone. Gould (2023) 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.

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