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

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

7 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...

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    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  2. 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

  3. Re:currently? by DamonHD · · Score: 4, Funny

    Relatively up-to-date when talking about /. news items. B^>

    Rgds

    Damon

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    http://m.earth.org.uk/
  4. MPH, really? by JeffreyBPetersen · · Score: 3, Informative

    Approximately 0.01c.

  5. Empirical lab by Oligonicella · · Score: 4, Funny

    Excellent news. Now we can determine if the rotational issues with galaxies holds. All we have to do is observe this now coreless galaxy for the next 10 to 50 million years and see if it's rotation changes.

  6. 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.

  7. Re:currently? by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    currently 40,000 years ago.

    Umm, no.

    First off, it's not in our galaxy, so the 40Kyears from galactic center is irrelevant to how far in the past the event was.

    Secondly, it's moving about 2200 km/s. So it has moved 40k ly from its original position at or near its galactic center over the last 5.4 megayears.

    Plus, of course, the time the light has taken to get here. No, I'm not going to read TFA to find out how far away it is to determine more precisely when it happened because...

    Ultimately, of course, relativity says that talking about when something happened in a galaxy far, far, away is completely meaningless anyways....

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