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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.05406,
title = {"Industrial-Scale" Black Hole Selection without a Satellite},
author = {Zexuan Wu and Subo Dong and Andrew P. Gould and Przemek Mróz and A. Mérand},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.05406},
year = {2026}
}