WATCH: How gravity waves kicked a massive black hole out of the centre of a galaxy

24 March 2017 - 12:55 By TMG Digital
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This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveals an unusual sight: a runaway quasar fleeing from its galaxy's central hub. A quasar is the visible, energetic signature of a black hole. Black holes cannot be observed directly, but they are the energy source at the heart of quasars — intense, compact gushers of radiation that can outshine an entire galaxy.
This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveals an unusual sight: a runaway quasar fleeing from its galaxy's central hub. A quasar is the visible, energetic signature of a black hole. Black holes cannot be observed directly, but they are the energy source at the heart of quasars — intense, compact gushers of radiation that can outshine an entire galaxy.
Image: NASA, ESA, and M. Chiaberge (STScI and JHU)

What could move an object that weighs about the same as a billion suns? What could generate the power of 100 million supernovas simultaneously?

According to Nasa, the answer may be gravitational waves.

The Hubble Space Telescope recently found something unusual, the quasar of a huge super-massive black hole that was not at the centre of a galaxy.

Examining the red shift on the quasar showed that the black hole was moving away from the galaxy's core at about 7.56 million kph, leading researchers to ask what the heck happened.

One idea was that the black hole might be behind the galaxy in question - but then Hubble would have detected another galaxy around it.

Instead the researchers think it is more likely the result of two supermassive black holes merging.

When two of these black holes merge, they release gravitational waves all over the place. If the two are mismatched - one is larger or spins faster - more of these waves in space-time will be released in one direction, rocketing the black hole out of its central home.

"When we combined observations from Hubble, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it all pointed towards the same scenario," said team leader Marco Chiaberge of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland in a statement.

 "This asymmetry depends on properties such as the mass and the relative orientation of the back holes' rotation axes before the merger," said team member Colin Norman of STScI and Johns Hopkins University in the statement, adding that this is why it is such a rare event.

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