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Supermassive Black Hole Rocketing Out of Distant Galaxy At 5 Million MPH (blastr.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the flying-through-space dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes: Astronomers have found a supermassive black hole barreling out of its home galaxy at 5 million miles per hour. The 3 billion solar mass behemoth formed from the merger of two slightly smaller black holes after two galaxies collided and themselves merged. The resulting blast of gravitational waves is thought to have been asymmetric, causing a rocket effect which launched the resulting black hole away. It's currently 40,000 light years from the galaxy's core. Source: ESA/Hubble

4 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Why not use the NASA article instead? by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Informative

    Article found here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  2. currently? by nyet · · Score: 1, Informative

    currently 40,000 years ago.

  3. MPH, really? by JeffreyBPetersen · · Score: 3, Informative

    Approximately 0.01c.

  4. Re:Miles by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some statistics that might help:

    horizon radius | 8.86×10^12 meters
    event horizon area | 9.86×10^26 m^2 (square meters)
    surface gravity | 5070 m/s^2 (meters per second squared)
    temperature | 2.057×10^-17 K (kelvins)
    entropy | 1.303×10^73 J/K (joules per kelvin)

    Relative velocity to speed of light = 5000000mph / 671000000mph = 0.00745c

    Using Lorentz formula

    T = 1.000027

    Even at 5 million mph, it's still in first gear relative to the speed of light.