Astronomers noticed a black hole along the way.
Supermassive black holes usually remain silent as they suck in anything that comes their way, but scientists have long thought that it is possible for them to wander through space. They have never caught one properly – until now.
Researchers and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian have identified the clearest example to date black hole ongoing, and published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal. About 230 million light-years away, in the center of a galaxy called J0437 + 2456, the team found what they were looking for.
“We do not expect the majority to move supermassive black holes; they are usually content to just sit,” lead author Dominic Pesce said in a news release. “They are just so heavy that it’s hard to get them going. Consider how much harder it is to kick a bowling ball than to kick a soccer ball – and realize that the ‘bowling ball’ in this “a few million times the mass of our sun. It’s going to take a pretty big kick.”
The team studied 10 distant galaxies and their supermassive black holes, specifically those containing water, over the past five years. They were able to measure the velocity of a black hole precisely based on the water orbiting the black hole, which produces a measurable laser-like beam of radio light known as a ‘maser’.
“We asked: are the velocities of the black holes the same as the velocities of the galaxies in which they live?” Pesce explains. “We expect them to have the same speed. If they do not, it means the black hole is disturbed.”
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Nine of the ten black holes rested – but one appears to be.
Follow-up observations with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, before its collapse, and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and Chile confirmed the findings: The black hole, which has a mass of 3 million times the sun, moves about 110,000 miles per hour within its galaxy. .
Scientists have two theories for the wandering black hole. One possibility? A collision.
“We can merge the aftermath of two supermassive black holes,” said co-author Jim Condon. “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.”
Scientists also think it is possible that the black hole is part of some.
“Despite every expectation that they really should be there to a large extent, scientists have found it difficult to identify clear examples of binary supermassive black holes,” says Pesce. “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.”
More observations are needed to understand the true cause of the peculiar movement.