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New study focusing on areas far from the center of the Abell 2261 galactic cluster has raised hopes that there will soon be clues to an enigmatic black hole that has so far slipped through astronomers’ nets
While our galaxy, the Milky Way, is known to have a black hole as massive as four million suns lurking at its center, the gigantic galaxy at the heart of the Abell 2261 cluster, which is around 2.7 billion away. light years from Earth, is expected to have an even larger object – a huge object with extremely powerful gravity that has a mass equivalent to 3 to 100 billion suns, astronomers assume, based on the approximate mass of the galaxy . A new study by a team led by Kayhan Gultekin at the University of Michigan has been accepted for publication in an American Astronomical Society journal.
The hitherto unknown monster has so far escaped cameras: researchers have already attempted to examine X-rays coming from the center of the galaxy in an attempt to locate the hidden black hole, but it was of no use.
The new study conducted further research of the galaxy using observations made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2018, including areas tilted away from the central part of the galaxy. based on the hypothesis that the much-wanted black hole could be pushed aside after a powerful galactic merger.
When black holes and other giant space objects collide, they send ripples through space-time called gravitational waves. Scientists say that while the waves emitted are not all symmetrical, they could push the fused supermassive black hole away from the center of the enlarged galaxy, in a process known as “recoil.”
Such stray black holes are to this day purely hypothetical and have never been detected by telescopes, unlike smaller black holes.
“It is not known whether supermassive black holes come close enough to each other to produce gravitational waves and merge; so far, astronomers have only verified mergers of much smaller black holes,” wrote NASA officials in a statement on the new study, adding that the detection of these “would embolden scientists using and developing observatories to search for gravitational waves from the fusion of supermassive black holes.”
The research team has now discovered that the densest concentrations of hot gases are far from the heart of the galaxy, but Chandra’s data has failed to map – even in a preliminary fashion – their location. Researchers are currently placing their hopes on Hubble’s successor – NASA’s state-of-the-art James Webb Large Space Telescope, due to be launched into space in October 2021.
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