About 230 millions of light-years from Earth there exists black hole going places. These extraordinarily dense objects are usual found sitting in the center of a galaxy violent swallowing counts, so it was a surprisewhen astronomers saw him moving out of step with its resident galaxy.
Containing more than 3 millions of times the mass of our Sun, the black hole is advancing over the cosmos at a level of 110,000-clip per mile per hour, and its movement was detected by an international team of researchers, using data from Arecibo Observatory and the Gemini Observatory. The new the work is aup to data collected in 2018.
“My initial reaction to the result was that I probably messed up somewhere,” said Dominic Pesce, astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, in an e-mail. “I had to go back through the tests several times before I could convince myself that the measurement was reproducible given the data I had in my hand at the time. But those tempting initial results were backed up by our updated measurements, which was both reassuring and enjoyable to watch.. ”
Roaming around the center of the galaxy J0437 + 2456, the black hole in question is wrapped in a megamasser of water, a galactic nucleus made brighter by water molecules floating around it in its accumulation disk. This brightness is detected in microwave lengths, which have been recorded by the two observers before the collapse of Arecibo’s main dish in December 2020. Pesce’s team looked to 10 megamassers of water around supermassive black holes and I found that only the black hole in J0437 + 2456 had this special movement. The team found that as the galaxy slid through space, so did the black hole – but a little slower than the elements revolving around it.
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The difference in speed may be due to a number of factors. One possibility is that black hole made of the merger of two smaller ones black holes; such a collision would leave the cosmic superstructure a little unstable. Another is that the black hole is foreign to its current and original galaxy the galaxy is merging with J0437 + 2456. The third option, as Pesce and his team (and perhaps the most interesting) pointed out, is that the water megamasser is in a binary system, and this iit’s the only black hole visible in the duo’s microwave.
Pesce said the trajectory of the black hole would be different depending on the nature of its motion, but it would take tens of thousands of years of observations to calculate it. surely. And in any case, the work of understanding the movement of the black hole is even more difficult. by the fall of Arecibo, who removed 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 like the one we collected in this paper for measuring the speed of the galaxy, ”said Pesce. “The field as a whole is still absolutely overwhelmed by the impact of losing such an iconic facility.”