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Since they were theorized as a consequence of General Relativity over a century ago, i black holes they have never ceased to amaze. After all, they are truly strange objects: corpses stars so compact as to trigger a tremendous deformation of the space time, so intense that it even traps light. Precisely for this reason, it is not possible to see them directly – they do not emit light – but it is possible to find the most disparate traces of them. Give her gravitational lenses in which the light of distant stars and galaxies passes through their deformation, up to the bright accretion disks that orbit around them, to date immortalized in only two cases by theEvent Horizon Telescope for the Milky Way and for the galaxy M87.
I study
A group of researchers from the Yale University is about to publish a new study that points to a kind of indirect clue never seen before. The study, accepted in the specialist journal The Astrophysical Journal Lettersbefore being published it must go through the peer review phase (even if it is already available on the archive of pre-print arXiv), therefore it may undergo changes before being definitively published. For now, the story this study tells us is not that of just any black hole, but that of a supermassive black hole that is escaping the gravity of its host galaxy. The discovery would have happened by chance, while researchers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to study the dwarf galaxy RCP 28. In the same sky field as Rcp 28, there was an irregular galaxy with one element that caught their attention: a trail of light pointing towards the center of the galaxy, like a trace left by something passing. The researchers then used theKeck observatory site in Hawai’i to learn more about the matter. The wake, full of energetic newborn stars, was long 200 thousand light years that connect the center of the galaxy to intergalactic space.
The dynamics
The story would go like this. The black hole would have left the host about 39 million years earlier when the light of the galaxy left to meet us (approx 7 and a half billion years ago), that is, we are seeing its traces left imprinted in the galaxy over 39 million years. Moving at the fearsome speed of 1600 kilometers per secondthe black hole would indeed have triggered a series of shock waves in the intergalactic medium, that set of gas and dust that are scattered everywhere in space outside the galaxies. These would have led the material, generally very rarefied, to compress and accumulate in some preferential areas, triggering the formation of new stars.
Galaxies often emit luminous jets from their nucleus, and it is not excluded that these jets can trigger phenomena of accumulation of intergalactic material similar to the one observed. However, researchers have thoroughly studied the wake, which exhibits different characteristics than one would expect in the case of a relativistic jet, as it is called. However, it is not a hypothesis that the team you feel excluded completely, although the escape of a supermassive black hole remains the most likely one, in this case.
The importance of discovery
The fact that the black hole could be ejected from the galaxy it is in is not something unexpected and would be the result of the gravitational interaction between multiple black holes. Moreover we know that even at smaller scales, for example in planetary systems, some objects can be expelled by gravitational interaction (as in the case of interstellar objects such as comet Borisov and ‘Oumuamua), increasing the mass of the objects under examination there is no that is why similar phenomena should not occur. Ejection of black holes has been observed in other cases, but in all of them they were black holes activei.e. surrounded by accretion disks which, falling by friction into the black hole, release heat and light. The black hole in questionInstead, it is inactive, i.e. it does not have this type of emission. These are the most elusive objects, because they do not emit light in any form and are therefore invisible. Having a way to observe its passage is therefore something invaluable in the study of the most extreme objects in our Universe.
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