A supermassive black hole is racing at 170,000 km / h across the universe, and the astronomers who spotted it do not know why.
The fast-moving black hole, which is about 3 million times heavier than our sun, zips through the center of the J0437 + 2456 galaxy, about 230 million light-years away.
Scientists have long believed that black holes can move, but such movement is rare because their huge masses require an equal amount of force to get them going.
Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe
“We do not expect the majority to move supermassive black holes; they are usually content to just sit,” said Dominic Pesce, study leader and astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. said in a statement.
To begin their search for this irregular cosmic appearance, the researchers compare the velocities of ten supermassive black holes with the galaxies in which they formed the center, and focus on the black holes with water in their accretion plates – the spiral collections of cosmic material revolve around the black holes.
Why water? As water orbits a black hole, it collides with other materials, and the electrons surrounding the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up the water molecules are excited to higher energy levels. When these electrons return to their ground state, they emit a beam of laser-like microwave radiation called a maser.
Using a cosmic phenomenon known as red shift, in which objects that stretch their light to longer (and therefore redder) wavelengths, astronomers were able to observe the extent to which the machine light shifted from the accrual disk. away from its known frequency when stationary, thereby measuring the speed of the moving black hole.
They take more observations from different telescopes and combine them all using a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI); With this technique, the researchers were able to combine the images of several telescopes to act effectively as an image captured by a very large telescope, approximately as large as the distance between them. In this way, the scientists were able to accurately measure the velocity of the black holes from which it originated.
One of the telescopes the researchers used for the experiment was the Arecibo Observatory, which has since been put into use after the instrument platform crashed into the disk of the telescope in December 2020.
Of the ten black holes they measured, nine were at rest, and one was on the move. Although 177,000 km / h (110,000 km / h) is fairly fast, it is not the fastest supermassive black hole. Scientists previously clocked a supermassive black hole that clocked through space at 5 million km / h (7.2 million km / h), they reported in 2017 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The researchers do not know what could have moved such a heavy object at such a high speed, but they came up with two possibilities.
“We can observe the aftermath of two supermassive black holes merging,” said Jim Condon, a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. said in a statement. “The result of such a merger could cause the newborn black hole to recede, and we could watch it during the setback or when it went down again.”
The other possibility is considered by astronomers to be much rarer and newer: the supermassive black hole may be part of a pair with another black hole that is invisible.
“Despite every expectation that they really should be there to a large extent, scientists have had a hard time identifying clear examples of binary supermassive black holes,” Pesce said. “What we can see in the J0437 + 2456 galaxy is one of the black holes in such a pair, while the other remains hidden from our radio observations due to the lack of emission of machine.”
If the black hole is dragged through an even larger, invisible one, it may explain why it travels so fast, but more observations are needed to get to the end of the mystery.
The group published their findings online in The Astrophysical Journal on March 12.
Originally published on Live Science.