We study the prospect of the Gaia satellite to identify black hole binary
systems by detecting the orbital motion of the companion stars. Taking into
account the initial mass function, mass transfer, common envelope phase,
interstellar absorption and identifiability of black holes, we estimate the
number of black hole binaries detected by Gaia and their distributions with
respect to the black hole mass for several models with different parameters. We
find that ∼200−1000 black hole binaries will be detected by Gaia during
its 5 years operation. The shape of distribution function of the black hole
mass is affected most severely by the relation between the zero-age main
sequence (ZAMS) stellar mass and the black hole mass in parameters adopted in
this paper, which implies that black holes detected with Gaia enables us to
constrain the mass relation.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in Ap
