Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."
Perspective: (Score:5, Informative)
Source. [newscientist.com]
Grammar Police (Score:1, Informative)
found evidence of a super massive black hole being tossed out of it's galaxy.
Ironically, the possessive form of "its" does NOT contain an apostrophe, despite its presence in many other possessive forms. Another example of this exception would be "their".
Anonymous Coward
Re:New horrible death... (Score:4, Informative)
Crossing the "event horizon" isn't really an interesting event in and of itself. It just marks a point of no escape and no return. Granted, if you're getting close enough to the black hole to be anywhere near the event horizon, the tidal stresses might be pretty intense, but the horizon itself is not a solid object and likely somewhat boring.
Also, supermassive black holes generally have remarkably low densities. A 6.5-billion-Sun black hole has a density of about "0.5 mg/cm3, less than half the density of earth's atmosphere at sea level. [scientificblogging.com]"
Re:Where's the Beef? er, Bow Shock? (Score:3, Informative)
The accretion disk could account for the X-rays. The reason they were looking for X-rays in the first place was to spot normal black holes.
The BBC is a little more skeptical (Score:5, Informative)
The BBC is a little more skeptical, noting "there are alternative explanations for the bright X-ray source; it could also be a Type IIn supernova, or an ultra-luminous X-ray source (ULX) with an optical counterpart (which could represent several phenomena)."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10108226.stm [bbc.co.uk]
I might argue that it is an ultra-luminous X-ray source with an optical counterpart that could represent several phenomena, with one of those phenomena being a super-massive black hole being ejected from a galaxy. But hey, that's just me! :)
Re:Where's the Beef? er, Bow Shock? (Score:5, Informative)
Things get a little weird when your dealing with general relativity and extreme space-time distortions. Also, space is mostly empty space. Even a black hole of this magnitude isn't going to have that strong of a pull over significant distances. For example, you'd feel only Earth-like acceleration at a distance of 1/10th of a light year. Our nearest stellar neighbor is 4.7 light years away. At that distance the acceleration would be .04 m/s^2.
Unless this thing was going through the dense core of the galaxy there's a pretty good chance it wouldn't be hauling much of anything except for it's old accretion disk.
Re:New horrible death... (Score:3, Informative)
The radiation from the accretion disk would disassociate your molecular structure long before you got close enough for tidal effects to kill you, especially in a galactic-mass black hole ;-)
SB
Re:Ok, it's a black hole... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, well I guess you missed the larger version of the image. [www.sron.nl]
Check it out. It's obvious there that it's hauling ass away from the center. I mean, look at all the little stars scrambling to get out of its way!