Black holes are hard to detect because the emit no light. In fact, they are usually only detected due to their gravitational force on nearby stars. When the black hole is not near another stellar body whose orbit or light it’s affecting, they can be much harder to spot.

Recently, scientists confirmed the existence of one such “runaway” black hole. The object, called OGLE-2011-BLG-0462, is an isolated stellar mass black hole that was detected through Hubble telescope data collected over a period of six years.

It’s an unusual type of black hole, and for a long time, researchers thought that the object was actually a neutron star.

“Until recently, all of the more than two dozen stellar-mass black holes discovered in our Galaxy, as well as the over 150 detected in external galaxies through mergers that emitted gravitational radiation, were in binary systems,” they write in the introduction of this paper.

The method used to detect this type of black hole is called microlensing or gravitational lensing, a phenomenon by which a black hole can distort the light of distant stars as it passes between the star and the observing body (in this case, our telescopes).

As explained by NASA, “The black hole distorts the space around it, which warps images of stars lined up almost directly behind it. This offers telltale evidence for the existence of lone black holes wandering our galaxy. The light from a background star is deflected and brightened by the black hole’s intense gravitational field. The Hubble Space Telescope goes hunting for these black holes by looking for distortion in starlight as the black hole drifts in front of background stars.”

This may the first of many such discoveries of these isolated and “runaway” black holes. But don’t let the term “run” fool you. This one is traveling more than thirty miles per hour through its section of the galaxy, a spot more than five thousand light-years away. So no fear it’s getting here any time soon.

This celestial body is a lonely wanderer.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.