Published time: 6 Oct, 2016 17:37
A “wandering” black hole more than 100,000 times the mass of the
sun has been found on the outskirts of a galaxy about 4.5 billion light
years from Earth.
Astronomers suspect that
it was originally located at the center of a smaller galaxy, but was
displaced during a collision with a larger one. The discovery gives
credence to a long standing theory about the existence of wandering
black holes.
Can black holes wander? This peculiar object could be one; created from a small galaxy falling into a larger one: https://t.co/G14jOxF9IYpic.twitter.com/PieNzYOBwS— NASA (@NASA) October 6, 2016
However they can be ‘ejected’ from their position following a collision and merger with another galaxy containing a massive black hole, creating a “wandering” black hole.
A new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, reports the discovery of one of these “wandering” black holes towards the edge of the lenticular galaxy GJ1417+52, which is about 4.5 billion light years from Earth.
Black holes themselves are not be visible, but astronomers can spot them by detecting the damage they do to their surroundings.
In this case, a star came too close to the black hole, named XJ1417+52, and was completely destroyed. This encounter generated a huge amount of X-rays, which were detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory.
Astronomers have previously spotted a few similar black holes but never anything on the scale of this latest discovery. Data showed XJ1417+52 about ten times brighter than the brightest X-ray source ever seen for a wandering black hole.
The extreme brightness of the object classifies it as a “hyper-luminous X-ray source,” and it features a mass about 100,000 times that of our sun.
The research team from the University of New Hampshire believe the black hole could have belonged to a smaller galaxy that crashed into GJ1417+52, stripping away most of the galaxy’s stars, leaving behind the black hole and its surrounding stars at the center of the galaxy.