Detecting Isolated Stellar-mass Black Holes with the Roman Telescope

Abstract

Abstract Isolated stellar-mass black holes (ISMBHs) are potentially discernible through microlensing observations, because they are expected to be long-duration microlensing events. In this work, we study the detection and characterization of ISMBHs using Roman observations. We simulate a large ensemble of such events, as they will be seen by Roman, and estimate the errors in the physical parameters of the lens objects, including their masses, distances, and proper motions, by calculating Fisher and covariance matrices. Since the ∼2.3 yr time gap between Roman’s first three observing seasons and its latter three seasons may lower the efficiency of its realization of microlensing events and characterization of ISMBHs, we additionally consider a scenario where we add a small number of additional observations—1 hr of observations, every 10 days, when the Bulge is observable during the large time gap—which is equivalent to a total of an additional day of observations with the Roman telescope. These extra observations increase Roman’s efficiency in terms of characterizing ISMBHs by ∼1%–2%, and, more importantly, they improve the robustness of the results, by avoiding possible degenerate solutions. By considering uniform and power-law mass functions ( dN / dM ∝ M − α , α = 2, 1, 0.5) for ISMBHs in the range of [2, 50]M ⊙, we conclude that the Roman telescope will determine the physical parameters of the lenses (the mass, distance, and relative lens–source angular velocity) within <5% uncertainty, with efficiencies of 21% and 16%–18%, respectively. By considering these mass functions, we expect that during its mission the Roman telescope will detect and characterize 3–4, 15–17, and 22–24 ISMBHs through astrometric microlensing, with the relative errors for all physical parameters being less than 1%, 5%, and 10%, respectively. Microlensing events due to ISMBHs with masses ≃10–25M ⊙ that are located close to the observer, with D l ≲ 0.5D s, while the source is inside the Galactic disk, can be characterized with the fewest errors.