AI and the World's Hard Problems · Astronomy & space · arXiv · 2026-10-23
A 13 Year Black Hole Microlensing Survey in Omega Centauri
The study examined whether stellar-mass black holes in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way's most massive star cluster, could be detected through microlensing. It searched nearly 200 Hubble Space Telescope images taken over 13 years, using a neural network trained on synthetic events, and found no convincing black hole lensing candidates. The authors concluded that the data should contain no such events, contrary to earlier expectations, and released the photometric dataset.