About 230 million light years from Earth, there is a black hole going on places. These extraordinarily dense objects are yousually found sitting in the center of a galaxy with violence startled matter, so it was a surpriseise when astronomers saw it moving out of step with its indwelling galaxy.
Contains more than 3 million times the mass of our sun, the black hole was advancing through the cosmos at a speed of 110,000mile per hour clip, and its movement was detected by an international team of researchers, using data from Arecibo Observatory and Gemini ObservatoryThe new paper is a sequeluntil data collected in 2018.
“My first reaction to getting the result was that I probably screwed something up somewhere,” said Dominic Pesce, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, in an email.I had to go through the entire analysis several times before I could convince myself that the measurement was reproducible given the data we had in our hands at the time. But those early tantalizing results were bolstered by our updated measurements, which were both reassuring and pleasing to see
Roaming around is the center of galaxy J0437 + 2456, the black hole in question wrapped in a water megamaser, a galactic core lightened by water molecules floating around its accretion disk. This brightness is detected in microwave lengths, which were previously recorded by the two observatories the collapse of Arecibo’s main course in December 2020. The Pesce team watched at 10 water megamasers around supermassive black holes and found that only the black hole in J0437 + 2456 had this peculiar movement. The team found that just as the galaxy floated through space, so was the black hole – but slightly slower than the elements whirling around it.
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The difference in speeds can be due to a number of factors. One possibility is that this black hole formed out the merger of two smaller ones black holes; such a collision would make the cosmic superstructure a little shaky. Another is that the black hole is alien to its current galaxy, and its original galaxy is merging with J0437 + 2456. A third option, as outlined by Pesce and his team (and perhaps most excitingly), is that the water megamaser is in a binary system, and this iIt is the only black hole visible to the microwave in the duo.
Pesce said the black hole’s trajectory would be different depending on the nature of its movement, but it would take tens of thousands of years of observations to calculate it. sure. Regardless, understanding the movement of the black hole becomes all the more difficult due to the collapse of Arecibo, eliminating a key source of information for astronomers, cosmologists and astrophysicists.
“The loss of Arecibo is tragic, as it was the most sensitive telescope of its kind; its loss prevents us from getting additional data of the kind we have gathered in this article for measuring the speed of the galaxy, ”said Pesce. “The field as a whole is still reeling from the impact of the loss of such an iconic facility.”