Supermassive Black Hole Mystery
Supermassive black holes usually sit in a center of a galaxy and eat matter. But recently, scientists caught one such supermassive black hole speeding through the J0437+2456 galaxy. Why? We don’t know.
Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
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Supermassive black holes usually like to sit on their asses in the center of a galaxy either pretending to be a lazy panda or are hard at work of an active galactic core that does spew out an incredible amount of energy. But some scientists think that certain supermassive black holes could be moving in space. But figuring whether it is true is not easy.
Dominic Pesce from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and his colleagues now caught such a moving supermassive black hole. Their research is so far the best evidence that these cosmic monsters can move through the Universe. And while the majority of supermassive black holes are sitting ducks as they are monstrously massive – sometimes they have the mass of millions or even billions of Suns – making them extremely hard to get moving.
Pesce and his coworkers search for moving supermassive black holes in the past five years. They compared the movement of galaxies to the movement of their supermassive black holes searching for any discrepancies. For their research, they picked galaxies with supermassive black holes that have a lot of water in their accretion disks. This is because as the water in the accretion disk circles the black hole a giant maser is created. In this particular case a beam of radio-waves that is similar to a laser. A terrestrial grid of radiotelescopes with the VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) technology can use the maser to very precisely measure the movement of the black hole and that can then be compared to the movement of the galaxy.
The scientists analyzed 10 galaxies this way. In 9 of them, the supermassive black hole was calm. But the last one really seems to have a moving supermassive black hole. This was the case with the spiral galaxy J0437+2456 that can be found roughly 230,000,000 light-years away from us. Its supermassive black hole has a mass of roughly three million Suns making it not that different from the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy.
Further observations performed by the radiotelescope Arecibo and on the Gemini telescopes confirmed that the black hole is actually moving. It is rushing through the galaxy at a speed of 49 kilometers per second and while the scientists so far do not know the reason why this is happening there are only two possibilities we can think of. The first is that this was caused by the merging of two supermassive black holes and that itself could have been caused by the galaxy eating a different galaxy.
The other and even more exciting option is that the supermassive black hole of the J0437+2456 galaxy is actually part of a binary system. But not an ordinary binary system. A binary system made from two supermassive black holes. Such systems would be exceedingly rare but they could potentially exist.
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