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."
The comedy is too easy on this one... (Score:3, Funny)
- The black hole was thrown out for arguing the balls and strikes.
- The galaxy wanted one of the new Energy Star black holes.
- The galaxy couldn't turn down the Universe's Cash For Clunkers program to trade in the used black hole.
- Circling each other must be the intergalactic version of foreplay.
- The merger of these black holes is actually pending shareholder approval.
Re:The comedy is too easy on this one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The comedy is too easy on this one... (Score:5, Funny)
It all started with a LHC.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, this was for the hit program "Survivor: Galaxy" and the black hole was just voted off.
Re:The comedy is too easy on this one... (Score:5, Funny)
Somewhere there's a supermassive bouncer...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't comedy supposed to be funny?
Not for nerds.
Usually, the teller is the only one who laughs at the joke. Then they trail off into awkward silence after trying to explain the joke...
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot making them into ‘yo momma’ jokes.
The title of TFA instantly made me think they meant her. ;)
But actually she wasn’t thrown out for being supermassive, or a whore, but because the stench of alcohol was only drowned by the vomit in her beard. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
- What a complete tosser!
Re: (Score:2)
No worries, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are already on the case.
Re: (Score:2)
And stay out! (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry :)
(looking at the picture in the article) (Score:2)
Oh, well, it's obvious to me that this is, indeed, a black hole being flung out into intergalactic space. The imagery plainly shows that... that...
hmmm...
Ok, it's a black hole... (Score:2)
but how do we know that it's being flung out of it's galaxy at high speed?
Re: (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!
Re: (Score:2)
Black != colour; it is a lack of colour...
Secondly you can detect them because they cause dust particles to be sucked in and by doing so these particle emit X-rays. X-rays can be detected and visualised in any colour the human eye can see =)
We are... (Score:3, Insightful)
...insignificant
Re: (Score:2)
It's like floating on a raft in an ocean of giant whirlpools.
Re: (Score:2)
...while this ocean is a drop of water on a hair of some fly. Plus with...lots of sharks in it? ;)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Not noticing far potential far more complex things might be as well simply a limitation of this "most complex structure in the universe (that we know of)"...
Re: (Score:2)
I’m really curious to learn exactly what that means.
How exactly is one human brain more complex than an entire human? Or more complex than a dolphin brain? Or more complex than a coral reef, or an aspen grove (or even any large tree)? Or the storm system of Jupiter (or weather in general)? Or the solar atmosphere? Or the Internet? Or the entire galaxy, which coincidently contains lots of brains?
Re: (Score:2)
The various connections between the neurons is making up a lot of the complexity I'd think. And a bigger brain does not necessarily mean more of those connections, as the human brain has a lot more of these than the dolphin brain.
But yes, structures containing brains are at least as complex as brains.
Re:We are... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, if we got hit with this thing we'd be only worth about 15 points.
Re: (Score:2)
Humans reading /. are also part of the universe. While we can't do anything with it at a large scale (yet?) doesn't take away that we are the universe trying to understand itself.
(If that makes you feel better 'bout it ;) )
Re: (Score:2)
Such view also somehow suggests that our type of Universe naturally drifts towards intelligence.
Which probably still means we're insignificant. Our intelligence and, most importantly, capabilities are quite limited; and they don't appear to be changing anytime soon. Unless of course you include one possible variant of our potential future descendant(s) - the kind of it(them) that shares mostly just a point of origin, and not much common even "in spirit". The kind we wouldn't even recognise as our progeny; a
Re: (Score:2)
Yet, given enough money that is, we might create a climate on mars. Never saw any piece of rock thinking *I want it to look like this* changed it own orbit and created a computer.
Insignificant, but very interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
Heck, we're "creating" (changing is a better word, also for Mars - it has climate) a climate here. ;p
That's of course interesting; and yeah, still insignificant. "Galaxy engineering" would be, slightly...
Where's the Beef? er, Bow Shock? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's the Beef? er, Bow Shock? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star [discovermagazine.com] is doing?
What do you think is generating the x-rays they're using to spot the black hole?
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Right... and accretion disks are created from the material falling into the black hole. If the black hole is heading into intergalactic space and NOT "dragging a fair amount of material with it", where is that material coming from?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't understand what you're getting at. Who says it's not "dragging a fair amount of material with it"?
Re: (Score:2)
Uhm,the same thing that they always use to spot black holes, xray emmissions are though of as 'SOP' for black holes.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star [discovermagazine.com] is doing?
What do you think is generating the x-rays they're using to spot the black hole?
I believe the X-Ray source may be a foreground or background object not associated with the galaxy, and possibly stationary as well. I would expect a super-massive black hole capable of anchoring an entire galaxy that is so off-center would cause some serious deformation to the host galaxy, which is a feature that clearly is not present in the provided image. I also believe the lack of an X-Ray source at the galactic nucleus is not due to the super-massive black hole being removed, but rather simply that
Re: (Score:2)
Raising this point causes a random question to pop into my mind. How hard would you have to pull on a star (by passing by it with a strong gravity well, for example) to kill the star?
I guess it's more about the force difference between the force applied to different sides of the star, but I'm curious. If a rift opens up in the side of the star, the high pressure plasma inside has to be pretty eager to escape.
Re:Where's the Beef? er, Bow Shock? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way to destroy a star would be to completely scatter all of its material out over an extremely wide area. Keep in mind, solar systems and their stars are formed by giant disks of dust slowingly being pulled together by their own gravity until they form stellar bodies. So to permanently get rid of the star, you'd have to spread it out over an area larger than it's solar system, or it would just re-form again eventually.
Re: (Score:2)
The gravity would be canceled when the rift is created. During which time the "center of gravity" would be a multi-point plot map between the two vastly different gravity wells. By creating the rift it would also create a pull on the surrounding matter giving it a bit of a head start with momentum since the gravity well would effect the entire star not just the side it passes on. Being a sharp drop off, gravity/distance could completely destroy a star by even comming close (cosmic distances). It could pull
Re: (Score:2)
Um, he got it the usage of effect right. Affect is a verb. Effect is a noun. "The affect" would be wrong, but unfortunately for your point, Romancer used "The effect".
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Any object that could tear a hole in a main-sequence star like the sun would probably be a compact star of some sort. See this summary of a Scientific American story from 2002:
When Stars Collide; The Secret Lives of Stars; Special Editions; by Michael Shara; 8 Page(s)
Of all the ways for life on Earth to end, the collision of the sun and another star might well be the most dramatic. If the incoming projectile were a white dwarf--a superdense star that packs the mass of the sun into a body a hundredth the size--the residents of Earth would be treated to quite a fireworks show. The white dwarf would penetrate the sun at hypersonic speed, over 600 kilometers a second, setting up a massive shock wave that would compress and heat the entire sun above thermonuclear ignition temperatures.
It would take only an hour for the white dwarf to smash through, but the damage would be irreversible. The superheated sun would release as much fusion energy in that hour as it normally does in 100 million years. The buildup of pressure would force gas outward at speeds far above escape velocity. Within a few hours the sun would have blown itself apart. Meanwhile the agent of this catastrophe, the white dwarf, would continue blithely on its way--not that we would be around to care about the injustice of it all.
I had read that original story and I recall they described a number of star-star impact scenarios (including black holes with main sequence stars).
Scientific AMERICAN? (Score:2)
Looks like a typical British understatement.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, my limited understanding is that the (outgoing) pressure inside of an active star is super-huge, and only balanced out by the force of gravity due to scale. If you suddenly redistribute the mass by yanking on it with a big gravity source, it seems to me that a huge amount of pressurized plasma would escape. If it loses enough mass, it could fall below the mass limit of fusion, or below the temperature limit of fusion, or something. I'm not an astrophysicist, though.
You do have a point though--it wo
Or you poison its fusion reaction (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sorry, the term is indeed entirely inaccurate, I just assumed people would understand what I meant.
A star has two major forces at the core--gravity and pressure. They are normally in equal balance with each other, which is why it maintains its size. If the mass density of the star changes suddenly, there will be places where the pressure may be higher or lower than the gravity. Or, that was my assumption, and what I meant by "rift". I understand that it has no physically existent surface.
Re: (Score:2)
The velocity the black hole is likely moving at isn't going to be a whole lot faster than that of it's surrounding medium, the scale is enormously greater. There probably is a bowshock, but we just can't see it from this distance with the instruments we have.
Also the bowshock is most likely radiating in the xray part of the spectrum.
The only real question I have about this is that the separation between the x-ray source and the center of the galaxy looks to be roughly about 3 arcsec
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: (Score:2)
I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star [discovermagazine.com] is doing?
Me, either. But... maybe that's how they know it's leaving at "high speed" - the faster it goes (beyond a certain point) the less material it would be dragging behind it, as the gravity waves are passing by too fast to overcome the existing inertia of the nearby material.
Re: (Score:2)
...and creating a bow shock...
IMHO only if it's traveling in the plane of the galaxy. If it was ejected normal to the galactic plane, there's likely insufficient matter to create a significant shock wave.
Whoa (Score:2, Funny)
Thats heavy, man!
Re:Whoa (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Whoa (Score:4, Funny)
Why are things so heavy in the future?
Is there a problem with the galaxy's gravitational pull?
Re: (Score:2)
Nah. It’s just because half the world is descendant from yo mom!
Perspective: (Score:5, Informative)
Source. [newscientist.com]
neat (Score:3, Funny)
I wish I had done something worthy of the front page of Slashdot when I was an undergrad.
Re: (Score:2)
So you're saying you never got sued by the RIAA nor sold a pre-release iPhone?
New horrible death... (Score:2)
Crossing the quickly rotating event horizon of two colliding black holes at the same time. Hmmm... makes me want to create an urban legend about it, so that the Mythbusters will be forced to recreate it someday.
Hollywood, get on it!
Ryan Fenton
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: (Score:2)
> ...but the horizon itself is not a solid object and likely somewhat boring.
It is, in fact, invisible and imperceptible to an observer crossing it.
Re: (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: (Score:2)
But wait, the scenario of parent poster gets interesting; especially since with supermassive black holes you wouldn't normally notice crossing the horizon.
Unless...the two horizons are just on the verge of merging, almost touching. And suddenly you find yourself in that space, with almost half of you inside one horizon, and the other almost half - inside the second one.
Well, probably not much different from, say, pulling apart somebody with horses. Extremelly instantenous even, as far as phycics allows...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Boring? You call it boring when the whole sky gets twisted into a tiny little dot while you get pulled to a mile-long thin strand?
Either it’s your imagination that is boring, or your sex is very very kinky. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, that's the average density. If black holes result in singularities or near-singularities, the density in the middle is incredibly high whereas the density near the event horizon is stunningly small. Excepting, of course, if there is some mechanism for convection inside the event horizon (e.g., constituent photons orbit the center instead of becoming part of it).
IANAA,
-l
Re: (Score:2)
The episode will conclude with Adam blowing up one of the black holes.
The fat ass (Score:2, Funny)
creating one supermassive beast. (Score:2)
i thought it said breast.
clicking the link left me disappointed.
So who is it aimed at? (Score:2)
Following up on Stephen Hawkings comments on extra-terrestrial life.
Re:So who is it aimed at? (Score:4, Funny)
Considering how long this takes to get anywhere, whomever it is aimed at hasn't even evolved from pond scum yet.
So still in the republican phase of existence.
Re: (Score:2)
First things first: Nobody knows if a black hole means the end. There are observations where black holes spew stars. Diving into the very crappy science right now (be warned);
String theory: we are trapped into a couple of dimensions, but also gravity. By means of gravity we can escape our universe and go to another one. The universe is flat. Quantum physics imply that our universe should at least be linked to another one, or there are more than two universes in pairs that are double sided. Maybe a black hol
Re: (Score:2)
I have a feeling that the stars that black holes spit out are new stars. So if we were to get sucked into a black hole, we would not exist. Out matter may exist, but we as humans would be gone.
Once again... (Score:2)
...science fiction anticipates scientific discovery:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBmgZv6YAxE&fmt=18 [youtube.com]
(From Red Dwarf series 4, episode 4, "White Hole".)
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! :)
Incredible Energies Involved (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, I can't think of any other reason it's there.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with this is that people very frequently say "it's a nice day" (instead of "it is a nice day"). And so it's rather convenient to have a consistent, rule-based way to write that same expression, without confusing anyone about whether or not you meant the term in its possessive form. Contractions are a natural part of language. Writing them down is an unavoidable necessity. So
Re: (Score:2)
it's "its", goddamnit (Score:4, Insightful)
Muse anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh baby dont you know I suffer?
Oh baby can you hear me moan?
You caught me under false pretenses
How long before you let me go?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsp3_a-PMTw [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Same here. Unfortunately, it's not a very quotable song except for the title, so I am not going to be able to sneak any lyrics from it into a casual Slashdot post.
Okay, I lied. You caught me under false pretenses.
Direction? (Score:2)
Get! The! Hell! Out! Of! My! Galaxy! (Score:2)
John Sheridan would be proud.
A quote comes to mind (Score:2)
Think how you'd feel if a bacterium sat at your table and started to get snarky. This is one little planet in one tiny solar system in a galaxy that's barely out of its diapers...
So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.
the boys from Muse... (Score:2, Funny)
It was probably thrown out of the galaxy because (Score:2)
when found using the Chandra Source Catalog it was looking in the young miss galaxy section.
Gravitational Waves (Score:2)
There wouldn't happen to be any stars orbiting it [wikipedia.org], would there?
Even if there isn't, this is another observation that agrees with the existence of Gravitational Waves, as predicted by General Relativity. If there was such a thing, a merger between two supermassive black holes in a binary system will experience a gravitational wave recoil. In extreme cases, it'll be ejected from the galaxy, much like the one here.
There is tons of weak evidence for gravitational radiation, but if this is true, this is a great
Out damned spot (Score:2)
Get out and take your beer drinking black hole buddies with you!
Galactic Pool? (Score:3, Funny)
Saint Peter: Eight Ball in the corner pocket?
God: Nah, jumped the bumper.
Saint Peter: Ooh. Not good!
God: What was that? You wanted a long tour of Hell?
Saint Peter: I mean SPECTACULAR SHOT MY LORD!
GNAA (Score:2)
GNAA is, without any doubt, involved in this...
No central black hole? (Score:2)
We know that a mass doesn't actually orbit around another mass, it orbits around the center of gravity of the 2 mass system. So now let's look at 3 masses. They each orbit the center of mass of the 3 mass system. Now let's look at a 400 billion mass sys
Now go away... (Score:2)
Or I will taunt you a second time!
Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
oh, an ACTUAL black hole (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Of course nobody would mind having a while hole in the neighborhood.
Kryten: I've never seen one before - no one has - but I'm guessing it's a white hole... [imdb.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure it does... he is claiming to be the summary's author, and is apologizing for his poor grammar.
It's alright, GP, we forgive you. Contrary to popular belief, not EVERY poster on Slashdot is a soulless, humorless, grammar-Nazi waste of life fuckwit.
Re: (Score:2)
We must repent with correct spelling an grammar immediately.
Re: (Score:2)
You are an AC, therefore a no one.
Re: (Score:2)
Sais you. No one will agree with you on that.
Re: (Score:2)
"Nope, I agree with him."
No one will be able to prove that the AC wasn't you.
"Who are you, by the way, and what makes your posts any more credible than those written by somebody who isn't bothering to use a pseudonym?"
No one knows.