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arXiv · 2509.05406

"Industrial-Scale" Black Hole Selection without a Satellite

Zexuan Wu·Subo Dong·Andrew P. Gould·Przemek Mróz·A. Mérand
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Abstract

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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Zexuan Wu, Subo Dong, Andrew P. Gould, Przemek Mróz, A. Mérand. 2025-09-05. "Industrial-Scale" Black Hole Selection without a Satellite. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357%2Fae274d

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