This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of use.

hubble_rogue_black_hole_thumbnail2

Most large galaxies like our own Milky Style accept a supermassive black hole in the center. Information technology'due south and then common that astronomers but expect to meet the telltale signs of a black pigsty in the heart of galaxies. But a new observation of a galaxy some eight billion light years away is different. Oh, it has a supermassive black pigsty, only it'southward not in the centre. Even more than fascinating: It'southward moving. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University believe this unusual situation is the consequence of the almost unfathomable energy released when two black holes collided.

The image above (taken by the Hubble Space Telescope) shows the black hole in question — a quasar called 3C 186. A quasar is the proper noun given to the bright band of gas orbiting a large blackness hole. The black hole itself is, of course, invisible. This 1 is estimated to be 1 billion times more massive than the dominicus. You can tell from fifty-fifty a brief inspection that the quasar is nowhere near the center of the galaxy. It'south actually about 35,000 light years away. That's over a tertiary the bore of the unabridged Galaxy.

The team confirmed the bright spot is really the a quasar in the galaxy, not simply an object betwixt the states and the milky way. Additionally, the red shift of this object tells us information technology'south moving — fast. It's blasting away from the heart of the galaxy at more than 1,300 miles per second (2,000 km per 2nd). Past comparison, our solar organisation orbits around the Galaxy at roughly 15 miles per 2nd (24 km per 2d).

It would take an incredible amount of energy to accelerate something that weighs every bit much as a billion suns to such loftier speed. In fact, the merely explanation that seems to fit is a collision with another supermassive black hole. Upon closer examination of the image, astronomers identified some arc-shaped features called "tidal tails." These point the i milky way we're looking at is actually 2, and they probably both had supermassive black holes.

The current thinking is that the interaction of these two black holes is what acquired the quasar ejection. As two huge objects arroyo each other, they whirl around each other, throwing off intense gravitational waves as they get closer. If in that location's an asymmetry — peradventure i black hole is a lot larger than the other or spins much faster — that tin can crusade a cyberspace propulsive strength in one management. This is likely what caused 3C 186 to shoot off like it did. Researchers believe this sort of imbalance is extremely rare, and so we are quite lucky to accept spotted it.