SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hole

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SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hole

Post by bystander » Mon May 10, 2010 1:47 pm

Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hole
Netherlands Institute for Space Research - 10 May 2010
In a distant remote galaxy, astronomers have possibly found a super-massive black hole that is recoiling out of the galaxy at high speed. The black hole, visible with X-rays as a clear star, is not located as normal in the centre of the galaxy. Recoiling black holes are interesting because they provide insights into how super-massive black holes develop in the centre of galaxies.
A bright off-nuclear X-ray source: a type IIn supernova, a bright ULX
or a recoiling super-massive black hole in CXO J122518.6+144545
  • arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1004.5379 > 29 Apr 2010
    Accepted for publication in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Science Centric | 10 May 2010

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Re: SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hol

Post by wonderboy » Mon May 10, 2010 2:32 pm

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100330.html


I remembered this galaxy as soon as I seen this post and wondered if something similar had happened to it. Is it possible that the galaxys "topsy turvy" appearance is due to a supermassive blackhole recoiling and ripping its way through the spiral arms etc of this galaxy. it may have exited from the left of the galaxy as there seems to be a trail of debris of some sort!

Its just a theory, and it could explain some of the unexplained mysteries of this galaxy. It does say that it is alone as a galaxy and therfore could not have collided with another, but perhaps this is a galaxy which has collided with another and is in the very late stages of thye collision, i.e. nearly nearly complete.


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Re: SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hol

Post by Chris Peterson » Mon May 10, 2010 2:48 pm

wonderboy wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100330.html
I remembered this galaxy as soon as I seen this post and wondered if something similar had happened to it. Is it possible that the galaxys "topsy turvy" appearance is due to a supermassive blackhole recoiling and ripping its way through the spiral arms etc of this galaxy. it may have exited from the left of the galaxy as there seems to be a trail of debris of some sort!
I don't think so. The referenced paper discusses a case of possible black hole recoil- a small transfer of linear momentum after two black holes merge. The resultant black hole is still extremely close to the galactic center.

I don't think there's any reason to think that a supermassive black hole would scramble a galaxy as seen in your example. It would have only a local effect, given a mass much less than the galaxy itself. The scrambled galaxy in the APOD seems reasonable explained by a collision; the absence of another galaxy suggests that we are seeing a merger.
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Re: SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hol

Post by wonderboy » Tue May 11, 2010 8:51 am

I read in the metro today about this supermassive blackhole (at least I believe it to be the same blackhole) and it stated that the hole was 1billion times the weight of our own sun! thats quite a blackhole.


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Re: SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hol

Post by Chris Peterson » Tue May 11, 2010 2:04 pm

wonderboy wrote:I read in the metro today about this supermassive blackhole (at least I believe it to be the same blackhole) and it stated that the hole was 1billion times the weight of our own sun! thats quite a blackhole.
I don't think it is the one in this galaxy. Most supermassive black holes found in galaxy centers mass millions of suns. But there are some really supersized black holes that reach billions of suns mass.
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RAS: Supermassive black hole is thrown out of galaxy

Post by bystander » Tue May 11, 2010 2:07 pm

Supermassive black hole is thrown out of galaxy
Royal Astronomical Society - RAS PN 10/39 - 11th May 2010

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Undergraduate student Marianne Heida of the University of Utrecht has found what appears to be a supermassive black hole leaving its home galaxy at high speed. As part of an international team of astronomers, this extraordinary discovery appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. [The galaxy studied by Marianne can be seen in the Hubble Space Telescope image above. The white circle marks the centre of the galaxy and the red circle marks the position of the suspected offset black hole. Image: STScI / NASA]

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Re: SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hol

Post by wonderboy » Tue May 11, 2010 2:42 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
wonderboy wrote:I read in the metro today about this supermassive blackhole (at least I believe it to be the same blackhole) and it stated that the hole was 1billion times the weight of our own sun! thats quite a blackhole.
I don't think it is the one in this galaxy. Most supermassive black holes found in galaxy centers mass millions of suns. But there are some really supersized black holes that reach billions of suns mass.


It definetely is this blackhole.

I'll quote the metro its much the same as what Bystander has written:
Blackhole 1billion times heavier than our Sun has been located as it 'recoils' from its galaxy. It was tracked down in a galaxy half a billion light years away by undergraduate Marianna Heida from Utrecht, by comparing hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources. Astronomers hope it will show if black holes in the cores of galaxies are the result of many lighter black holes merging"

On my previous note, if this blackhole has recoiled (which i have no doubt that it has) from the centre of the galaxy, it has already travelled quite a distance, and looking at the size of the smudge determined to be the blackhole, it takes up a h ell of a lot more of a percentage of the galaxies mass than any other object as such. I think it might be possible for recoiled Galaxies to destroy or at least tangle up existing galaxies much the same as that in my link above.

Would this blackhole eat other large stars within this galaxy causing super novas and other blackholes to appear, or would it create smaller blackholes in so doing and eat them up, making the supermassive blackhole larger?



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Re: SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hol

Post by Chris Peterson » Tue May 11, 2010 4:08 pm

wonderboy wrote:On my previous note, if this blackhole has recoiled (which i have no doubt that it has) from the centre of the galaxy, it has already travelled quite a distance, and looking at the size of the smudge determined to be the blackhole, it takes up a h ell of a lot more of a percentage of the galaxies mass than any other object as such. I think it might be possible for recoiled Galaxies to destroy or at least tangle up existing galaxies much the same as that in my link above.
I'd back up a bit. First of all, the research does not say this is a recoiling black hole. What was discovered is a bright x-ray source near the center of a galaxy. The paper suggests (non-preferentially) that a recoiling black hole is one plausible explanation- others are given as well. If it is a recoiling black hole, there is no way of determining its mass without further work. Other (secondary) articles that state one billion solar masses are nothing but guesses. Determining the mass of a SMBH isn't simple, and it is even more difficult if not in the center of a galaxy. I don't see anything to suggest that anybody has attempted to determine the mass of this x-ray source (which isn't even confirmed to be a black hole).

The smudge in the image (identified as a possible optical counterpart to the x-ray source) is not a black hole. If related, it may be associated with an accretion disc, or it may be a star cluster. The black hole itself is far too small to resolve.
Would this blackhole eat other large stars within this galaxy causing super novas and other blackholes to appear, or would it create smaller blackholes in so doing and eat them up, making the supermassive blackhole larger?
Statistically, you would expect a recoiling black hole to be moving out of the plane of the galaxy. So in almost all cases, it wouldn't be encountering much material to interact with. If it were in the plane of the galaxy, you might expect to see tidal distortion in regions near the black hole. You wouldn't expect the black hole to consume much material, and certainly not to create other black holes.
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Re: SRON: Astronomers find recoiling super-massive black hol

Post by wonderboy » Sun May 23, 2010 2:21 pm

Thanks a bunch chris!? Ya big fountain of knowledge that you are :).


Paul
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