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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

1 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Fucking SCIENCE, amirite?? Holy WOW!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Every one of these sentences translates to "You have no idea what this means and neither do we, but we really, really need the clicks so we're going to hype this shit up like NASA just made first contact."

    "it’ll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It’s chaos wielded on a mind-crushing scale."
    "Holy. WOW."
    "a distance vast enough to shrink even the mightiest galaxy to a smear of light."
    "But wait. Did I say “central”? Yeah, not so much. It appears to be significantly offset from the galaxy’s core, by about 40,000 light years. That’s a long haul."
    "the astronomers who investigated this object came up with a scenario that, frankly, gives me the willies."
    "That’s why I get the heebie-jeebies about stuff like this. Cripes!"
    "Imagine something that can toss around an object a billion times the mass of the Sun at speeds thousands of times faster than a rifle bullet!"
    "Why do I love science? That’s why."

    Meanwhile in real-scientist land...

    "When I first saw this, I thought we were seeing something very peculiar," said team leader Marco Chiaberge