A Newborn Monster Black Hole May Get the Boot When Its Parent Galaxies Collide

[Judi Lynn]

By Nola Taylor Redd 4 hours ago Science & Astronomy

The galactic core can break free.



As two supermassive black holes spiral around one another and merge, they create gravitational waves. With enough energy, they can "kick" themselves out of their starting spot, or even completely out of their home galaxy.(Image: © NASA)


When galaxies collide, the supermassive black holes at their centers are thrown together. Sometimes the pair merge together gracefully. But if the two black holes come together with enough energy, the new black hole can be pushed away from the center of that galaxy, or even kicked out completely. Hunting for these off-center black holes can help scientists better understand how often galaxies merge as well as determine the frequency of the gravitational waves they generate.

Like all black holes, supermassive black holes absorb all light and cannot be directly seen. Instead, scientists identify them by hunting down their gravitational effects on stars, gas and dust around them. But unlike the smaller black holes generated by single stars, supermassive black holes have somewhere around 100 times the mass of the sun. Because of their huge mass, their mergers should produce gravitational waves that the European Space Agency's Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) spacecraft will be able to detect after its launch.

Intrigued by the connection to gravitational waves, Yashashree Jadhav, a graduate student at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, began to search for supermassive black holes that were offset from the center of their galaxy. Jadhav is combing through a hundred galaxies imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to determine how many host off-center black holes. Jadhav presented her work in January at the annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

Kicked from the galaxy
Most galaxies show some signs of having consumed another galaxy in their past. Even the Milky Way will one day merge with its neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, though not for billions of years. The two galaxies don't always blend smoothly, and infalling gas and dust can collide to spark new star formation.

More:
https://www.space.com/galactic-mergers-kick-out-monster-black-hole.html

[qazplm135]

1. Imagine a supermassive black hole

kicked out of its home galaxy and flying through the intergalactic void...until it makes contact with another galaxy.

There's going to be some bad days for some inhabitants in that galaxy!