Astronomers have seen a black hole in motion.
Supermassive black holes generally, stand still while sucking everything that comes their way, but scientists have long thought it was possible for them to roam space. They have never taken any of them properly so far.
Researchers and the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have identified the clearest example of one black hole in motion, publishing his 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 don’t expect most supermassive black holes to move; they usually settle for sitting,” lead author Dominic Pesce said in a press release. “They’re so heavy that it’s hard to get them up and running. Think about how much harder it is to throw a moving bowling ball than to make a soccer ball, realizing that in this case the” ball of bowling “is several million times the mass of our Sun. This will require a fairly powerful kick.”
The team has studied ten of them distant galaxies and its supermassive black holes, specifically those containing water, for the past five years. They were able to accurately measure the speed of a black hole as a function of the water orbiting around the black hole, which produces a laser-measurable beam of radio light, known as a “maser.”
“We asked: Are the speeds of black holes the same as those of the galaxies in which they reside?” Pesce explained. “We hope they have the same speed. If they don’t, that means the black hole has been drilled.”
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Nine of the ten black holes rested, but one seemed to be in motion.
Follow – up observations with the Arecibo The Observatory of Puerto Rico, before its collapse, and the Observatory of the Twins in Hawaii and Chile confirmed the findings: the black hole, which has a mass that is 3 million times that of our sun, moves at about 110,000 miles per hour within its galaxy.
Scientists have two theories about the wandering black hole. A possibility? A collision.
“We may be observing the consequences of the merger of two supermassive black holes,” co-author Jim Condon said. “The result of this fusion can cause the newborn black hole to recede, and we may be observing it at the time of receding or while it is re-settling.”
Scientists also think it is possible that the black hole is part of a pair.
“Despite all the expectations that it really should be out of a certain abundance, scientists have had difficulty identifying clear examples of binary supermassive black holes,” says Pesce. “What we might see in the galaxy J0437 + 2456 is one of this pair’s black holes, and the other is hidden in our radio observations due to its lack of maser emission.”
More observations are needed to understand the true cause of the peculiar movement.