:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/G63MJDFM4NBBNGFRR5LI5Y5QE4.JPG "Are there rogue and out of control black holes? 1")
Every known large galaxy has a a supermassive black hole who reside in the centers of most of them. And scientists wonder if these hungry giants will ever escape their hosts to wander freely in the void?
This question could begin to find an answer after the observations made by a group of experts through the use of the The Hubble Space Telescope. It’s that according to a new study that was published in a preprint in the journal Astrophysical Journal Lettersthere is a narrow band of stars emerging from a distant galaxy and could be a sign of a supermassive black hole escaping from the center of a galaxy.
When two galaxies collide, their supermassive black holes spiral toward the center of the gravity well like roulette balls on a spinning wheel. It may take hundreds of millions or even billions of years, but eventually the internal spiral of black holes leads to their merger, an event that can give the newly formed black hole a final push, causing it to be ejected from the center of the galaxy itself. This is what the most consensual theory predicts.
“Black hole shrinkage is a natural result of our models,” said Marta Volonteri, an astronomer at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, who has studied several simulated collisions of supermassive black holes.
The situation can be made more complicated by the idea of a new theory: before two black holes merge, another galaxy could pass by, donating a third black hole. The resulting gravitational dance of this trinity can eject one of them, usually the one with the lowest mass, from the core with tremendous speed.
Despite predictions, scientists are still searching for their first runaway black hole. The most compelling candidate so far is a quasar known as 3C 186, which appears to be displaced from the center of its host galaxy. However, the chance finding reported in the new study could give the quasar a run for its money.
What piqued scientists’ interest in the possible escape of a black hole from a galaxy was a nearly straight trail of stars emerging from a dwarf galaxy. At first glance, the feature looked like ejected jets of active galactic nuclei, but close examination showed its properties to be unlike anything seen before. For one, the light shows clear stellar signatures rather than plasma, unlike typical jets. The shape of the contrail, pencil-pointed at the top and a little wider closer to the galaxy, is also the exact opposite of what we associate with AGN jets.
The team suggests that we are watching the trail of a fleeing black hole as it moves through the gas surrounding its galaxy at around 1,600 kilometers per second (3.5 million mph). The passage of the black hole shocks the medium, causing the formation of stars in its path. “It’s really quite strange how much it looks like in our images,” said Volonteri, whose team has predicted similar pathways in the past, though she and her colleagues weren’t involved in the news. study.
Meanwhile, closer examination of the area has revealed a much fainter second trail on the other side of the galaxy. Once again, the well-known bipolar jets from active galactic nuclei come to mind as the obvious explanation, but the evidence just doesn’t add up. “We discussed it a lot. I’m really convinced it can’t be bipolar flow, it just doesn’t make sense,” said Grant Tremblay, senior researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian in the US, who contributed to the study.
The team speculates that the galaxy, whose irregular shape and enthusiastic star formation suggest a recent collision, was originally home to three black holes. While the lighter black hole was ejected to create the light trail, the remaining pair were ejected in the opposite direction with a slightly slower velocity.
It is too early to confirm the discovery of a runaway supermassive black hole, let alone three. However, there are ways to better manage the origin of trails. The team is particularly interested in a bright spot at the end of the brightest track, where the black hole might be hiding.
“The detection of a point source of X-rays at the top of this tail would be a lookalike of an accreting black hole. In the years to come, the astronomical community will undoubtedly observe the feature with various observatories from Earth and space,” concluded Tremblay.
Continue reading: