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A new study focusing on areas outside the center of the Abell 2261 galactic group has raised hopes that there will soon be evidence of an enigmatic black hole that has so far crept through astronomers’ nets.
While our galaxy, the Milky Way, is known to have a black hole as massive as four million suns lurking in its center, the giant galaxy in the heart of the Abell 2261 cluster, which is about 2.7 billion light-years away. of Earth, should have an even larger one – a huge object with a very strong gravity, which has a mass equivalent to up to 3 billion to 100 billion suns, astronomers assume, based on the approximate mass of the galaxy. A new study by a team led by Kayhan Gultekin of the University of Michigan has been accepted for publication in a journal of the American Astronomical Society.
The unheard-of monster has so far avoided the cameras: researchers have previously tried to look at X-rays from the center of the galaxy in an attempt to observe the hidden black hole, but to no avail.
The new study conducted a more in-depth search of the galaxy using observations made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2018, including areas inclined to the central part of the galaxy, based on the assumption that the long-desired black hole could be pushed to the side. after a strong galactic fusion.
When black holes and other giant space objects collide, they send waves in space-time known as gravitational waves. Scientists claim that if the waves are not all symmetrical, they could push the fused supermassive black hole away from the center of the extended galaxy, in a process known as “recoil”.
Such pushed black holes are so far purely hypothetical and have never been detected by telescopes, unlike smaller black holes.
“It is not known whether supermassive black holes even come close to each other to produce gravitational waves and unite; so far, astronomers have only verified the mergers of much smaller black holes,” NASA officials wrote in a statement about the new study. , adding that the detection of these “would encourage scientists who use and develop observatories to search for gravitational waves in the fusion of supermassive black holes.”
The research team now found that the densest concentrations of hot gas were far from the heart of the galaxy, but Chandra’s data failed to map – even preliminarily – their location. Researchers are now putting their hopes on Hubble’s successor – NASA’s large James Webb space telescope, which is set to be launched into space in October 2021.