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A new study focusing on areas far from the center of the Abell 2261 galactic cluster has raised hopes that soon there will be clues about an enigmatic black hole that has so far been leaked by astronomers’ networks.
While it is known that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a black hole as massive as four million suns hiding in its center, the giant galaxy in the heart of the Abell 2261 cluster, which is about 2.7 billion years old. light from Earth, should have an even bigger one: a huge object with a super strong gravity that has a mass equivalent to between 3,000 and 100,000 million suns, astronomers assume, based on the approximate mass of the galaxy. A new study by a team led by Kayhan Gultekin of the University of Michigan has been accepted for publication in a journal of the American Astronomical Society.
The hitherto unheard-of monster has so far avoided the cameras: researchers previously tried to look at X-rays coming from the center of the galaxy to try to detect the hidden black hole, but to no avail.
The new study conducted a more in-depth study of the galaxy using observations made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2018, including areas tilted toward the central part of the galaxy, based on the assumption that the much sought after black hole could be pushed to the side after a powerful galactic fusion.
When black holes and other giant space objects collide, they send ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. Scientists argue that if the emitted waves are not all symmetrical, they could move the fused supermassive black hole from the center of the expanded galaxy, in a process known as “backtracking.”
These secluded black holes are so far purely hypothetical and have never been detected by telescopes, unlike smaller black holes.
“It is not known whether supermassive black holes are even close enough to each other to produce gravitational waves and merge; so far, astronomers have only verified the fusion of much smaller black holes,” officials wrote. NASA in a statement on the new study, adding that the detection of these “would encourage scientists to use and develop observatories to search for gravitational waves from the fusion of supermassive black holes.”
The research team has now discovered that the densest concentrations of hot gas were far from the heart of the galaxy, but Chandra’s data could not map, not even preliminarily, its location. Researchers are currently placing their hopes on Hubble’s successor, NASA’s large James Webb space telescope, which will be sent into space in October 2021.