Slashdot Mirror
Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."
- The black hole was thrown out for arguing the balls and strikes.
- The galaxy wanted one of the new Energy Star black holes.
- The galaxy couldn't turn down the Universe's Cash For Clunkers program to trade in the used black hole.
- Circling each other must be the intergalactic version of foreplay.
- The merger of these black holes is actually pending shareholder approval.
Sorry :)
wow! :-)
Oh, well, it's obvious to me that this is, indeed, a black hole being flung out into intergalactic space. The imagery plainly shows that... that...
hmmm...
...insignificant
I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?
Thats heavy, man!
The largest black hole discovered to date (AFAIK) is 18 times larger than the one in TFA.
Source.
I wish I had done something worthy of the front page of Slashdot when I was an undergrad.
sustainable living
Out of it is galaxy?
Sorry that does not make sense.
Crossing the quickly rotating event horizon of two colliding black holes at the same time. Hmmm... makes me want to create an urban legend about it, so that the Mythbusters will be forced to recreate it someday.
Hollywood, get on it!
Ryan Fenton
had it coming.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?
What do you think is generating the x-rays they're using to spot the black hole?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
i thought it said breast.
clicking the link left me disappointed.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
found evidence of a super massive black hole being tossed out of it's galaxy.
Ironically, the possessive form of "its" does NOT contain an apostrophe, despite its presence in many other possessive forms. Another example of this exception would be "their".
Anonymous Coward
Following up on Stephen Hawkings comments on extra-terrestrial life.
Of course nobody would mind having a while hole in the neighborhood.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
...science fiction anticipates scientific discovery:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBmgZv6YAxE&fmt=18
(From Red Dwarf series 4, episode 4, "White Hole".)
The accretion disk could account for the X-rays. The reason they were looking for X-rays in the first place was to spot normal black holes.
But it sucks less.
The accretion disk could account for the X-rays. The reason they were looking for X-rays in the first place was to spot normal black holes.
Right... and accretion disks are created from the material falling into the black hole. If the black hole is heading into intergalactic space and NOT "dragging a fair amount of material with it", where is that material coming from?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Run, you fools!
"() it's galaxy ()". Really? "It's"?
The BBC is a little more skeptical, noting "there are alternative explanations for the bright X-ray source; it could also be a Type IIn supernova, or an ultra-luminous X-ray source (ULX) with an optical counterpart (which could represent several phenomena)."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10108226.stm
I might argue that it is an ultra-luminous X-ray source with an optical counterpart that could represent several phenomena, with one of those phenomena being a super-massive black hole being ejected from a galaxy. But hey, that's just me! :)
There was so much power involved in the interaction between those two black holes that millions of apostrophes were flung violently out of the two merging galaxies. One of them landed in the middle of this summary's word "its" and making the editor appear to be an idiot.
I mean, I can't think of any other reason it's there.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Come on, "editors", would it kill you to edit every once in a while?
sic transit gloria mundi
kereyten: I've never seen one before no one has- but i'm guesing its a white hole, thats the hole point how do you see a white hole say for getting sucked into it then we get to discover what happens, Oh NASA one last Mission to discover whats in a black hole
The ORI are comeing!!!!
Yeah! We don't want your kind in here, mate. Don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.
Oh baby dont you know I suffer?
Oh baby can you hear me moan?
You caught me under false pretenses
How long before you let me go?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsp3_a-PMTw
Duh...
I don't understand what you're getting at. Who says it's not "dragging a fair amount of material with it"?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Raising this point causes a random question to pop into my mind. How hard would you have to pull on a star (by passing by it with a strong gravity well, for example) to kill the star?
I guess it's more about the force difference between the force applied to different sides of the star, but I'm curious. If a rift opens up in the side of the star, the high pressure plasma inside has to be pretty eager to escape.
Raising this point causes a random question to pop into my mind. How hard would you have to pull on a star (by passing by it with a strong gravity well, for example) to kill the star?
I guess it's more about the force difference between the force applied to different sides of the star, but I'm curious. If a rift opens up in the side of the star, the high pressure plasma inside has to be pretty eager to escape.
Um, no. Despite what Star Trek might have you believe, you can't open up a "rift" in a star. It's a ball of plasma - imagine trying to crack open a flame.
Is coming here? Dont panic, but.. i f it will hit earth, we may have only a few billion years to escape
If you did manage to tear a "rift" in the "side" of a star, nothing would really happen. The inside of the star is also the center of gravity of the star. The plasma doesn't want to escape, it is being pulled always towards the center of mass of the star. Your rift would pretty much instantly disappear as the gravity of the star continues to pull on the material around it, the star will pretty quickly turn spherical again.
The only way to destroy a star would be to completely scatter all of its material out over an extremely wide area. Keep in mind, solar systems and their stars are formed by giant disks of dust slowingly being pulled together by their own gravity until they form stellar bodies. So to permanently get rid of the star, you'd have to spread it out over an area larger than it's solar system, or it would just re-form again eventually.
but how do we know that it's being flung out of it's galaxy at high speed?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The velocity the black hole is likely moving at isn't going to be a whole lot faster than that of it's surrounding medium, the scale is enormously greater. There probably is a bowshock, but we just can't see it from this distance with the instruments we have.
Also the bowshock is most likely radiating in the xray part of the spectrum.
The only real question I have about this is that the separation between the x-ray source and the center of the galaxy looks to be roughly about 3 arcseconds; the maximum angular resolution of Chandra is about half an arcsecond; it's possible that this could be a positioning error, although I'm sure they've already thought of that and independently verified the source's position.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Things get a little weird when your dealing with general relativity and extreme space-time distortions. Also, space is mostly empty space. Even a black hole of this magnitude isn't going to have that strong of a pull over significant distances. For example, you'd feel only Earth-like acceleration at a distance of 1/10th of a light year. Our nearest stellar neighbor is 4.7 light years away. At that distance the acceleration would be .04 m/s^2.
Unless this thing was going through the dense core of the galaxy there's a pretty good chance it wouldn't be hauling much of anything except for it's old accretion disk.
~X~
no one gives a shit. trust me.
John Sheridan would be proud.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The gravity would be canceled when the rift is created. During which time the "center of gravity" would be a multi-point plot map between the two vastly different gravity wells. By creating the rift it would also create a pull on the surrounding matter giving it a bit of a head start with momentum since the gravity well would effect the entire star not just the side it passes on. Being a sharp drop off, gravity/distance could completely destroy a star by even comming close (cosmic distances). It could pull enough matter off center so that the fusion reaction overcomes the lower gravity on the close side and has a blow out like a solar flare but one that doesn't close up after the erruption due to gravity. So the effect would have to be caused by the speed of the passing gravity well, the proximity and angle of incidence. But it would probably have a better than 50% chance of destroying it after a certain distance until it was moving too fast to overcome the matter stability (initial momentum) of the star.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Think how you'd feel if a bacterium sat at your table and started to get snarky. This is one little planet in one tiny solar system in a galaxy that's barely out of its diapers...
So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.
The game.
Any object that could tear a hole in a main-sequence star like the sun would probably be a compact star of some sort. See this summary of a Scientific American story from 2002:
When Stars Collide; The Secret Lives of Stars; Special Editions; by Michael Shara; 8 Page(s)
Of all the ways for life on Earth to end, the collision of the sun and another star might well be the most dramatic. If the incoming projectile were a white dwarf--a superdense star that packs the mass of the sun into a body a hundredth the size--the residents of Earth would be treated to quite a fireworks show. The white dwarf would penetrate the sun at hypersonic speed, over 600 kilometers a second, setting up a massive shock wave that would compress and heat the entire sun above thermonuclear ignition temperatures.
It would take only an hour for the white dwarf to smash through, but the damage would be irreversible. The superheated sun would release as much fusion energy in that hour as it normally does in 100 million years. The buildup of pressure would force gas outward at speeds far above escape velocity. Within a few hours the sun would have blown itself apart. Meanwhile the agent of this catastrophe, the white dwarf, would continue blithely on its way--not that we would be around to care about the injustice of it all.
I had read that original story and I recall they described a number of star-star impact scenarios (including black holes with main sequence stars).
... are gonna be pissed.
when found using the Chandra Source Catalog it was looking in the young miss galaxy section.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
There wouldn't happen to be any stars orbiting it, would there?
Even if there isn't, this is another observation that agrees with the existence of Gravitational Waves, as predicted by General Relativity. If there was such a thing, a merger between two supermassive black holes in a binary system will experience a gravitational wave recoil. In extreme cases, it'll be ejected from the galaxy, much like the one here.
There is tons of weak evidence for gravitational radiation, but if this is true, this is a great find.
I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?
Me, either. But... maybe that's how they know it's leaving at "high speed" - the faster it goes (beyond a certain point) the less material it would be dragging behind it, as the gravity waves are passing by too fast to overcome the existing inertia of the nearby material.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Get out and take your beer drinking black hole buddies with you!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I'm sorry, the term is indeed entirely inaccurate, I just assumed people would understand what I meant.
A star has two major forces at the core--gravity and pressure. They are normally in equal balance with each other, which is why it maintains its size. If the mass density of the star changes suddenly, there will be places where the pressure may be higher or lower than the gravity. Or, that was my assumption, and what I meant by "rift". I understand that it has no physically existent surface.
Well, my limited understanding is that the (outgoing) pressure inside of an active star is super-huge, and only balanced out by the force of gravity due to scale. If you suddenly redistribute the mass by yanking on it with a big gravity source, it seems to me that a huge amount of pressurized plasma would escape. If it loses enough mass, it could fall below the mass limit of fusion, or below the temperature limit of fusion, or something. I'm not an astrophysicist, though.
You do have a point though--it would most likely reform anyway.
I don't recall where I read it but there was an observation a while back of what they belived to be a star in the process of being ripped apart by a black hole. Basically it turns into a long arc of hot gas with a bulge in the middle that aligns with the trajectory of the star around the black hole. The effect was not dissimilar to how comet Schomaker-Levy (sic?) broke up and formed a long streak of debris before smashing into Jupiter. However since the star is entirely made of gas then the streak of debris forms a much smoother distribution.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Um, he got it the usage of effect right. Affect is a verb. Effect is a noun. "The affect" would be wrong, but unfortunately for your point, Romancer used "The effect".
Saint Peter: Eight Ball in the corner pocket?
God: Nah, jumped the bumper.
Saint Peter: Ooh. Not good!
God: What was that? You wanted a long tour of Hell?
Saint Peter: I mean SPECTACULAR SHOT MY LORD!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
English is a non-standards compliant language. It has inconsistent rules and grammar due to haphazard adoption of loan words and unusually, also foreign grammar. It is thus a very hard language to master (English is my second language). I think that had the British not created the British Empire, the English language would probably be an obscure North-West European language. Also, stop nit picking on its or it's. It makes no difference and does not detract readers from understanding the sentence. Simply don't use "its". Just type "it is". You still use 3 characters either way.
GNAA is, without any doubt, involved in this...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Uhm,the same thing that they always use to spot black holes, xray emmissions are though of as 'SOP' for black holes.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
ya, you're a total doosh.
Given enough iron thrown into the star center, sooner or later it can't sustain the equilibrium fusion energy agaisnt gravitational energy. Then depending on the size, it can go into various state of death, expansion, supernovae etc... So yeah, there are way to kill a star, but what for ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Black holes are supposed to be a short cut to another galaxies. Isn't it? http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/alta-white-teeth-whitening-review-does-alta-white-work-1989826.html
I have seen the videos of the stars at the center of our galaxy whipping around a central unseen mass. These images are compelling. Now I'm going to propose something and I really want someone with a grasp on mechanics to explain why it is impossible:
We know that a mass doesn't actually orbit around another mass, it orbits around the center of gravity of the 2 mass system. So now let's look at 3 masses. They each orbit the center of mass of the 3 mass system. Now let's look at a 400 billion mass system. Don't the masses orbit the CENTER OF MASS of the entire system? So the stars in the center of the galaxy are simply orbiting a point, NOT AN ACTUAL MASS. They are just being pulled by the combined gravitation of all the stars around.
Why is this wrong? What am I missing? Thanks in advance for clearing up my naive misconception.
...and creating a bow shock...
IMHO only if it's traveling in the plane of the galaxy. If it was ejected normal to the galactic plane, there's likely insufficient matter to create a significant shock wave.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It was kicked out by Leonidas.
If I remember my physics correctly, The larger a black hole gets, the weaker it's gravity becomes.
N/T
From TFA "Marianne’s newly-discovered object is probably the result of the merger of two smaller black holes. Supercomputer models suggest that the larger black hole that results is shot out away at high speed, depending on the direction and speed in which the two black holes rotate before their collision." So we could potentially have any number of billion+ solar mass black holes hurtling around the universe at considerable fractions of the speed of light. That will not help me sleep at night.
The link for "one supermassive beast" in the summary points to a nude picture of Rosie O'Donnel.
No, he got the usage wrong in a different portion of his post. "The gravity well would effect the entire star." Effect is a verb as well as a noun, that means to bring about or create, which is clearly not the intended meaning in this context.
On the other hand it could be Rosie O'Donnell in search of a snack after polishing off the last galaxy.
Or I will taunt you a second time!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I'm no astrophysicist but shouldn't a galactic anchor supermassive black hole tearing ass through it's soon-to-be former host galaxy be dragging a fair amount of material with it and creating a bow shock, much as this runaway star is doing?
What do you think is generating the x-rays they're using to spot the black hole?
I believe the X-Ray source may be a foreground or background object not associated with the galaxy, and possibly stationary as well. I would expect a super-massive black hole capable of anchoring an entire galaxy that is so off-center would cause some serious deformation to the host galaxy, which is a feature that clearly is not present in the provided image. I also believe the lack of an X-Ray source at the galactic nucleus is not due to the super-massive black hole being removed, but rather simply that the super-massive black hole that is there is not currently "eating" anything and thus is not producing prodigious amounts of X-Rays.
"Now GET THE HELL out of our galaxy!"
#6495ED - cornflower blue
I thought it was talking about Megan Fox getting thrown out of some club called "Galaxy," my bad
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Looks like a typical British understatement.
Proxima Centauri is 4.2 ly from Sol.
872835240
Someone should really let the Twi-hards know...
Correction noted. :)
~X~
~X~
Ooops, you are right, I was wrong...I only caught the second usage ("So the effect would have to be caused by the speed of the passing gravity well")