Ananya DuttaBlack holes are a wonder and mystery, they are so massive that even light can’t escape their gravitational pull. The supermassive black holes, the biggest of them all can have the mass of a billion suns. These supermassive black holes reside at the center of every galaxy. They are the behemoths that are in control of the birth of new stars. So, the idea that something would be able to push around a supermassive black hole seems quite ridiculous.
But it seems that the impossible has come to pass because scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a supermassive black hole some eight billion light years away from earth that seem to have been dethroned. It seems that the galaxy called 3C186 is expelling its black hole somehow and the black hole is streaking away at an incredible speed of 4.7 million miles per hour. This is unheard of, experts say that a supermassive black hole can be displaced if 100 million stars went supernova simultaneously.
The phenomenon was detected when scientists noticed a very bright quasar in the 3C186 galaxy. This in itself isn’t unusual, as every galaxy has one. A quasar can be called the nucleus of a galaxy; its brightness can be attributed to the disk of gas that encloses a black hole. What made this picture unique was the location of the quasar. It was 35,000 light years away from 3C186’s center.
In order to confirm the findings, scientists compared measurements from many different instruments. They even collected data through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s telescope in New Mexico that can measure the stretching of light when something travels through space and Chandra space observatory that can detect even the faintest of X-rays coming from outer space. This additional information confirmed the findings and helped determine the speed of the black hole and its mass.
Scientists believe that the supermassive black hole could have been displaced due to gravitational waves. This waves can be found when two galaxies merge. After a collision the two black holes begin to circle each other and gravitational waves are flung out every which way. If the spin rates and mass of the black holes are significantly different then it is possible that more gravitational waves might have been sent in one direction compared to the other. Eventually when the two black holes finally merged, the strongest gravitational waves might have propelled it off the galaxy’s center.
Mohith Agadi
