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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 largest black hole discovered to date (AFAIK) is 18 times larger than the one in TFA.
Source.
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! :)
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~