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Giant black hole kicked out of home galaxy

By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. Published: June 5, 2012
System CID-42, located about 4 billion light-years away. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.Civano et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Optical (wide field): CFHT, NASA/STScI

"It's hard to believe that a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of the Sun could be moved at all, let alone kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed," said Francesca Civano from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "But these new data support the idea that gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space first predicted by Albert Einstein but never detected directly — can exert an extremely powerful force."


"These black holes would be invisible to us," said Laura Blecha from CfA, "because they have consumed all of the gas surrounding them after being thrown out of their home galaxy."

Civano and her group have been studying a system known as CID-42, located in the middle of a galaxy about 4 billion light-years away. They had previously spotted two distinct compact sources of optical light in CID-42, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

More optical data from the ground-based Magellan Telescope and Very Large Telescope in Chile supplied a spectrum — that is, the distribution of optical light with energy — that suggested the two sources in CID-42 are moving apart at a speed of at least 3 million mph (4.8 million km/h).


"The previous data told us that there was something special going on, but we couldn't tell if there were two black holes or just one," said Martin Elvis from CfA. "We needed new X-ray data to separate the sources."




Both of these alternate explanations would require at least one of the supermassive black holes to be obscured, since only one bright X-ray source is observed. Thus the Chandra data support the idea of a black hole recoiling because of gravitational waves.

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4 stars
Extraordinary that a Supermassive Black Hole, one of the universe's weightiest objects, can apparently be kicked out of a galaxy by immensely powerful gravitational waves, whose very existence scientists on Earth are still trying to prove by incredibly delicate experiments. We need much more discussion about this curious paradox through your excellent magazine.
5 stars
What is presently postulated as non-baryonic dark matter is aether.

The ripple created when galaxy clusters collide is an aether displacement wave.

The ripple created when galaxy clusters collide is a gravitational wave.
5 stars
Fascinating! Maybe black hole encounters would be the thing to look for in the search for gravity waves. If the researchers look far enough, chances are they could actually catch the ongoing process and detect the gravity waves rumbling through space-time! And this would merely be ripples in the gently undulating sea of space-time!
4 stars
Please, don't describe cosmic velocities in millions mph or km/h! Really interesting is not a big number, but velocity relative to light velocity c, known to be 300,000 km/sec. 4.8 million km/h are just 1,3 thousand km/sec.
5 stars
It realy is amazing what can be discovered by means of optical observations and comparing these with X-ray observations. I have the same question: What happens in de milky way and what would the effects be?
5 stars
If there is no time without space then isn't time really the first dimension?

whatever happened,it happened millions of years ago,and should not effect us in our lifetime
Could this be alternative explanation for Dark Matter?
5 stars
WOW! It is mind boggling what goes on out there. I am glad to know that Hubble is very much in the mix of discovering new information to send back to our astronomers. Thank you for these articles! It is the stuff we live to read.
4 stars
Just what I needed to learn today. Super-massive rogue black holes roaming the universe. Makes me feel ever so secure here on tiny little vulnerable Earth!
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