Astronomers detect a supermassive black hole «out of control»

These objects can fuse and undergo violent transformations that make them «leap» into the intergalactic space: then they become wandering black holes (not to be frightened, but it is not impossible for one to be fired into the Solar System, although Yes extremely unlikely).

The Universe is full of surprises. There are planets that are expelled from their Solar Systems by the gravity of other bodies, as if they were simple comets, and wander in solitude by the darkness of the space. On the outskirts of the galaxies, there are solitary stars ejected that travel towards the «emptiness» (in fact, the emptiness of space is never empty). And not only that. Something much larger and more mysterious, which is usually in the center of the galaxies or subject to its gravity, can also go wrong alone: ​​these are black holes. These objects can fuse and undergo violent transformations that make them «leap» into the intergalactic space: then they become wandering black holes (not to be frightened, but it is not impossible for one to be fired into the Solar System, although Yes extremely unlikely).

NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory has set its sensors on what appears to be a huge tramp: a supermassive black hole of 160 million solar masses. It is, for the moment, in an elliptical galaxy located 3.9 billion light years from Earth, in the Great Bear. These observations have recently been published in arXiv and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. (Here you can see a Youtube video about the studio).

This dark accumulation of mass could be exiled when two black holes merged, and emitted a violent «shout» in the form of gravitational waves. The process of union, a mystery to science, changed the state of the hole. It made him heavier and made him move in a specific direction, as if he had been shot by a huge pier. In fact, the power of the spring depends on one of the few properties that define black holes: spinning.

At the beginning, astronomers observed with Chandra a powerful X-ray source, which had the signature of growing supermassive black holes (which means they are engulfing gas from their environment). With the old Hubble telescope, they observed two points in the same place. They concluded that these points could be showing two different things: either a pair of supermassive black holes, or a homeless black hole.

The Hubble images, in blue, actually show two luminous points. One clearer and one more diffuse. One is in the center of the galaxy, and the other 3,000 light years beyond. The one seen above is a powerful X-ray source, as shown by Chandra, and according to data obtained by several telescopes (the Keck in Hawaii and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey), it seems to have a different speed To that of the galaxy. That is why astronomers suspect that it is a wandering supermassive black hole that is moving away from the stars of the center of the galaxy.

Source.I21