About 230 millions of light-years from Earth, there is one black hole sites. These extraordinarily dense objects are usually found sitting in the center of a galaxy violently swallowing it matters, so it was a surprisewhen astronomers saw this moving out of step with its resident galaxy.
Containing more than 3 million times the mass of our Sun, the the black hole was advancing through the cosmos to a level of 110,000-one mile-per-hour clip, and its movement was detected by an international team of researchers, using data from Arecibo Observatories and the Gemini Observatory. The new the role is a sequelUntil data collected in 2018.
“My first reaction to getting the result was that I had probably wrapped something somewhere,” said Dominic Pesce, astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, in an email. “I had to re-analyze several times before I could convince myself that the measure was reproducible given the data we had on hand at the time. But the first tempting results have been reinforced by our updated measures, which have been both reassuring and rewarding.“.
Roaming around the center of the galaxy J0437 + 2456, the black hole in question is wrapped in a megamaser of water, a galactic nucleus made brighter by water molecules floating in its accretion disk. This luminosity is detected in microwave lengths, which were previously recorded by the two observatories the collapse of Arecibo’s main course in December 2020. Pesce’s team watched to 10 megamassers of water around supermassive black holes and we found that only the black hole of J0437 + 2456 had this peculiar motion. The team found that just as the galaxy glided through space, so did the black hole, but a little slower than the elements revolving around it.
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The difference in speeds could be due to several factors. One possibility is that black hole formed from merging two smaller ones black holes; such a collision would leave the cosmic superstructure somewhat unstable. Another is that the black hole is alien to its current galaxy and its original the galaxy is in the process of merging with J0437 + 2456. A third option, as mentioned by Pesce and his team (and perhaps the most exciting), is that the water megamaser is in a binary system, and this ands the black hole visible in the microwave to the duo.
Pesce said the trajectory of the black hole would be different depending on the nature of its motion, but it would take observations for tens of thousands of years to calculate it. of Insurance. And in any case, the task of understanding the motion of the black hole becomes even more difficult by the collapse of Arecibo, which has removed a key source of information for astronomers, cosmologists and astrophysicists.
“The loss of Arecibo is tragic, as it was the most sensitive telescope of its kind; its loss prevents us from obtaining additional data of the type we have collected in this paper to measure the speed of the galaxy, “Pesce said.” The field as a whole is still absolutely reduced by the impact of losing a facility. so emblematic “.