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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 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.
...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?
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
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.
Crossing the "event horizon" isn't really an interesting event in and of itself. It just marks a point of no escape and no return. Granted, if you're getting close enough to the black hole to be anywhere near the event horizon, the tidal stresses might be pretty intense, but the horizon itself is not a solid object and likely somewhat boring.
Also, supermassive black holes generally have remarkably low densities. A 6.5-billion-Sun black hole has a density of about "0.5 mg/cm3, less than half the density of earth's atmosphere at sea level."
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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."
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
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
Considering how long this takes to get anywhere, whomever it is aimed at hasn't even evolved from pond scum yet.
So still in the republican phase of existence.
It's deep, for sure.
Why are things so heavy in the future?
Is there a problem with the galaxy's gravitational pull?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
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~
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).