Astronomers casually spotted a black hole slipping through space

Some 230 millions of light years from Earth, there is a black hole going places. These extraordinarily dense objects are usually found sitting in the center of a galaxy violently engulf matter, so it was a surpriseThat’s when astronomers spotted this one moving out of step with its resident galaxy.

Containing more than 3 million times the mass of our Sun, the black hole was advancing through the cosmos at a speed of 110,000clip mile per hour, and its movement was detected by an international team of researchers, using data from Arecibo Observatory and Gemini Observatory. New paper is a follow-upuntil data collected in 2018.

“My first reaction to getting the result was that I had probably missed something somewhere”, said Dominic Pesce, astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the article, in an email. “I had to review all the analyzes several times before I could convince myself that the measurement was reproducible given the data we had in hand at the time. But these enticing first results were reinforced by our updated metrics, which was both reassuring and rewarding to see.. “

Roaming around the center of the galaxy J0437 + 2456, the black hole in question is wrapped in a water megamaser, a galactic nucleus made brighter by water molecules floating in its accretion disk. This brightness is detected in the microwave lengths, which were recorded by the two observatories before the collapse of Arecibo main course in December 2020. The Pesce team watched 10 megamasers of water around supermassive black holes and found that only the black hole in J0437 + 2456 had this particular motion. The team found that just as the galaxy glided through space, so did the black hole – but slightly slower than the elements swirling around.

The difference in speed could be due to a number of factors. One possibility is that this black hole formed by the fusion of two smaller ones black holes; such a collision would leave the cosmic superstructure a little unstable. Another is that the black hole is alien to its current galaxy, and its original galaxy is in the process of merging with J0437 + 2456. A third option, as stated by Pesce and his team (and perhaps the most exciting), is that the water megamaser is in a binary system, and this Is the black hole visible by microwaves in the duo.

Pesce said the black hole’s trajectory would be different depending on the nature of its motion, but it would take tens of thousands of years of observations to calculate it. certainly. And in any case, the work of understanding the movement of the black hole is made all the more difficult. by the collapse of Arecibo, which eliminated a key source of information for astronomers, cosmologists and astrophysicists.

“The loss of Arecibo is tragic 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 article to measure the speed of the galaxy, ”Pesce said. “The estate as a whole is still absolutely reeling from the loss of such an iconic facility.”