At the heart of the galaxy J0437 + 2456 lies a black hole, astronomers think they have found a restless black hole.
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
A supermassive black hole, about 3 million times more massive than the sun, is in flight. About 230 million light-years from Earth, the black hole has been disturbed and is now moving strangely at a speed of about 110,000 miles per hour – but astronomers do not quite know why.
In a new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal on Friday, a team of astronomers observed supermassive black holes in the heart of galaxies looking for signs that they could move unusually. In space, everything moves in all sorts of directions thanks to the pressure and pull of gravity, but most black holes move in the same direction at the same velocity as their host system.
“We do not expect most supermassive black holes to move; they are usually content to just sit around,” Dominic Pesce, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the study, told the Harvard said. Government Gazette.
Not so for the galaxy J0437 + 2456 and its SMBH. It’s not enough to just sit around.
In 2018, Pesce and colleagues noticed that the supermassive black hole in the middle of J0437 + 2456 might have acted a little weird. Follow-up of their original observations of the galaxy with the now dilapidated Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and Chile, they now describe the rare and funky movement of the galaxy’s giant black hole.
To study the motion of black holes – invisible cosmic animals – the team had to focus on the area around the holes. To circle the SMBH in the center of a galaxy is a “growth disk” of debris and dusty material that is slowly thrown up. It is an excellent source of light and radio waves. The team looked at SMBHs that contained water in their disks and looked for a sign that dumped the circular water – the extremely scientific sound phenomenon called a “maser”. This emission can be used to measure the velocity of a black hole.
Of the ten black holes they studied, only one in the middle of J0437 + 2456 was unusual. It did not move at the same speed as its home system.
But how is it so disturbed? The team is not really sure, but offers some possibilities.
The focus of their studies was to use masers to identify pairs of SMBHs or black holes that had recently joined together. In the merger scenario, the new black hole can ‘flush back’, which may explain why its velocity differs from the home system. If it is a pair of black holes – a binary system – then the violent pressure and pull of gravity can disturb its velocity.
There is also the possibility that it is an SMBH from an external galaxy that recently collided with J0437 + 2456.
For now, it remains a mystery.