All posts tagged: black hole merger

Runaway supermassive black hole may be the result of a violent cosmic collision

Runaway supermassive black hole may be the result of a violent cosmic collision

Published by Jenni Sidey

A supermassive black hole appears to be racing away from its galaxy at nearly 1,000 kilometers per second, leaving a 202,000-light-year trail of star formation behind it. Computer models indicate the black hole was likely launched when two fairly similar, rapidly spinning black holes merged with their spins tilted out of alignment. The object could give astronomers a preview of the enormous black hole mergers that the future LISA gravitational-wave observatory is designed to detect. A black hole may have been hurled from its galaxy at nearly 1,000 kilometers per second, leaving a narrow, star-forming trail more than 200,000 light-years long behind it. The object, known as RBH-1, sits at the leading edge of a striking linear feature first noticed in Hubble Space Telescope images in September 2022. The structure extends about 62 kiloparsecs, or roughly 202,000 light-years, from a compact galaxy called GX, around 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. At the tip is an unresolved point source with no detectable stellar continuum. Behind it lies a wake only about 1 kiloparsec wide, filled with …

Wandering black hole found 30,000 light-years from its galaxy’s center

Wandering black hole found 30,000 light-years from its galaxy’s center

Published by Jenni Sidey

Astronomers spotted a black hole feeding on a star far from the center of its galaxy, something scientists had rarely seen before. They found it using an AI tool that scans the whole sky for the telltale flash of a black hole tearing a star apart, instead of only checking galaxy centers. The black hole weighs about a million times as much as our sun and may have been flung out of its galaxy’s center or left behind after a smaller galaxy was swallowed by a bigger one. A flash of light near the edge of a massive galaxy, far from its glowing center, turned out to be a black hole tearing a star apart. Astronomers had assumed the biggest black holes always sit at a galaxy’s heart. This one didn’t. The discovery marks the first time scientists have caught a dormant black hole so far out on a galaxy’s outskirts. The black hole itself gives off no light. It only became visible for a moment, when it shredded a passing star in an event …

Black hole GW190521 may be a wormhole from another universe

Black hole GW190521 may be a wormhole from another universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

For just one-tenth of a second in May 2019, the universe delivered a signal that did not fit the usual script. LIGO and Virgo recorded a gravitational wave from GW190521, but unlike the familiar rising chirps from orbiting black holes spiraling together, this one arrived more like a crack, brief, blunt, and missing a clear inspiral phase. That made it an oddity from the start. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration interpreted it as the merger of two black holes, one about 85 times the Sun’s mass and the other about 66 times, which then formed a remnant black hole of about 142 solar masses. In that reading, GW190521 became the first observed example of an intermediate-mass black hole. Even so, the event has never sat comfortably within standard expectations. The source black holes fell into a mass range that the article describes as being in tension with established models of stellar evolution, a region often discussed as the “forbidden gap.” That tension has helped keep GW190521 near the center of debate, even as the broader catalog of …