Section 230 million light-years from Earth, tha a black hole going places. These things are extremely dense usually is found sitting at the center of a galaxy violent gobbling up issue, so it was a surpriseshe when astronomers saw this one moving out of step with its resident galaxy.
Including more 3 million times the mass of our sun, the a black hole was emerging across the cosmos at the level of 110,000-mile-per-hour clip, and its movement was discovered by an international team of researchers, using data from Arecibo Theater and Gemini Theater. The new paper follows-up to data collected in 2018.
“The first idea I got for the result was that I might have picked up 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 go back through the whole study several times before I was able to convince myself that the measurement was reproducible with the data we had at that time. But these interesting first results are bolstered by our updated measurements, which have been both encouraging and gratifying to see.. ”
Moving away around mid galaxy J0437 + 2456, that black hole is covered in water megamaser, a galactic nucleus lightened by water molecules floating around in its collecting disk. This brightness is detected in microwave lengths, previously recorded by the two observatories an fall of the main dish of Arecibo in December 2020. Pesce team watched at 10 megamasers of water around supermassive black holes and found that only the black hole in J0437 + 2456 had this particular move to it. The team discovered that just as the galaxy shone through space, so did the black hole – but a little slower than the elements orbiting it.
G / O Media may receive a commission
The difference in speed could be due to a number of factors. One chance is that this will happen black hole formed from union of two smaller black holes; such a collision would leave the cosmic superstructure a bit uncertain. Another is that the black hole is alien to its conventional galaxy, and its original one galaxy is currently bundled with J0437 + 2456. The third option, as explained by Pesce and his team (and perhaps the most interesting ones), and that the water megamaser is in the binary system, and this is the only visible black hole in a microwave in the duo.
Pesce said the path of the black hole would vary depending on the nature of its movement, but would take tens of thousands of years to measure. for sure. And in any case, the task of understanding the movement of the black hole is made more difficult with the fall of Arecibo, which has erased your key source of information for astronauts, cosmologists, and astronauts.
“The loss of Arecibo is very sad, because it was the most sensitive telescope of its kind; its loss prevents us from obtaining additional data of the kind we have collected in this paper for measuring the speed of the galaxy, ”said Pesce. “The whole sector is still completely affected by the loss of such a prestigious facility.”