‘Restless’ Supermassive black hole mysteriously found traveling in space

We tend to think of supermassive black holes as pretty much paperwork stuff – sitting there banging in the middle of a galaxy while everything else goes around.

But that’s not always the case, and now astronauts still have the best evidence for a supermassive black hole that not only moves through the Universe, but moves around inside. his own galaxy. There are ants in his pants and witches in his brushes, and while it’s not clear why, the explanations are potentially inspiring.

“We don’t expect most black holes to move; they’re usually willing to sit around,” explained astronaut Dominic Pesce of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“They’re just so heavy it’s hard to get them to go. Consider how hard it is to kick a bowling ball than it is to kick a football – realizing that this is the case a ‘bowling ball’ several million times bigger than our sun. That’s going to require a very powerful kick. “

Capturing a peripatetic supermassive black hole in the act is not easy. They are found just over large gaps of space, millions to billions of light years; at these distances, it is a challenge to separate the motion of one object – even though that object is a terrible black hole – in an entire galaxy.

Pesce and his team thought they might have had some luck with a kind of galactic nucleus called a megamaser. This is a type of active black hole with a circulating disk of gas and dust filtering it, generating a lot of heat and light.

With megamaser, this formula contains additional ingredients: molecules such as hydroxyl, water, formaldehyde, and methine that enhance the brightness of the nucleus in microwave waves.

Using a method called very long baseline interferometry, which combines views from a network of radio telescope antennas to efficiently create a single large viewing dish, the speed of these megamasers can be accurately measured.

By studying water megamasers in particular, Pesce and his colleagues hoped to be able to identify any black megalith holes that would move at different speeds to the orbit around them.

“We asked: Is the speed of the black holes equal to the speed of the galleries in which they live?” he said. “We expect them to have the same speed. If they don’t, that means the black hole has been disturbed.”

The team took a closer look at 10 megamasers, comparing black hole speed data against observations on the entire galaxy. Certainly, nine of them were in line with our expectations of black holes lying in the diseased center, like a spider in a net.

One, however, exhibited different behaviors. In the spiral galaxy J0437 + 2456, located about 228 million light-years away, there is a very large black hole about 3 million times the mass of the sun, which appeared to be moving at a very different speed from rest of the galaxy.

According to the team’s study, the speed of the black hole is approximately 4,810 kilometers per second (2,990 miles per second). The galaxy’s neutral hydrogen, on the other hand, appears to be declining at a speed of 4,910 kilometers per second. According to observations of star and gas movements, the distance of the inner region of the galaxy is 4,860 kilometers per second.

Since all these dimensions are very different from each other, and the galaxy’s speed structure seems to be quite complex, it’s hard to tell why everything revolves around it.

There are several explanations. The galaxy could happen to something else, like another galaxy. The supermassive black hole could be hit by another supermassive black hole, generating a recoil kick that pushed the black hole out of position; the motion could be the galaxy and the black hole settling back.

Or a previously unseen binary partner could be in the black hole, both orbiting a center of gravity inside a galactic nucleus.

“Despite all the expectations that they should be out there in abundance, scientists have had a hard time identifying clear examples of binary supermassive black holes,” Pesce said.

“What we might see in the galaxy J0437 + 2456 is one of the black holes in such a pair, with the other left hidden to our radio observations due to so few maser emissions. “

Whether it’s a recoil kick or a binary companion, that would be great news for astronauts. There are many unanswered questions about supermassive black holes, such as how they grow so big, and whether supermassive black hole binaries can close the last parsec of distance between them. Evidence for unified black hole binaries and unions could help us answer these questions.

This is good news for us here in the Milky Way, too: since we are a few billion years away from galactic union, there is little chance that we will have the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A *, develops wanderlust anytime soon.

The team hopes to pay more attention to the galaxy and its unique nucleus in an attempt to reduce the cause of its strange behavior.

The research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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