Hubble captures incredible images of supermassive black hole _ Daily Mail Online
- 7 years ago
With the energy of 100 million supernovae, gravitational waves may have ejected a supermassive black hole from the center of a distant galaxy.
The Hubble Space Telescope spotted a rogue black hole that’s said to be the largest yet to be found outside of a galactic core, weighing more than 1 billion suns.
Astronomer suspect the ‘monster object’ was kicked out of the center as two large black holes merged, unleashing powerful gravitational waves.The find, according to NASA, was out of the ordinary.
‘When I first saw this, I thought we were seeing something very peculiar,’ said team leader Marco Chiaberge of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University.
‘When we combined observations from Hubble, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it all pointed towards the same scenario.
‘The amount of data we collected, from X-rays to ultraviolet to near-infrared light is definitely larger than for any of the other candidate rogue black holes.’
Hubble images in visible and near-infrared light revealed a bright quasar named 3C 186 in a galaxy 8 billion light-years away.
But, the object was far from the galaxy’s core.
These are known to be energetic signatures of black holes, and are typically found in the center.
‘I was anticipating seeing a lot of merging galaxies, and I was expecting to see messy host galaxies around the quasars, but I wasn’t really expecting to see a quasar that was clearly offset from the core of a regularly shaped galaxy,’ Chiaberge said.
‘Black holes reside in the center of galaxies, so it’s unusual to see a quasar not in the center.’
The Hubble Space Telescope spotted a rogue black hole that’s said to be the largest yet to be found outside of a galactic core, weighing more than 1 billion suns.
Astronomer suspect the ‘monster object’ was kicked out of the center as two large black holes merged, unleashing powerful gravitational waves.The find, according to NASA, was out of the ordinary.
‘When I first saw this, I thought we were seeing something very peculiar,’ said team leader Marco Chiaberge of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University.
‘When we combined observations from Hubble, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it all pointed towards the same scenario.
‘The amount of data we collected, from X-rays to ultraviolet to near-infrared light is definitely larger than for any of the other candidate rogue black holes.’
Hubble images in visible and near-infrared light revealed a bright quasar named 3C 186 in a galaxy 8 billion light-years away.
But, the object was far from the galaxy’s core.
These are known to be energetic signatures of black holes, and are typically found in the center.
‘I was anticipating seeing a lot of merging galaxies, and I was expecting to see messy host galaxies around the quasars, but I wasn’t really expecting to see a quasar that was clearly offset from the core of a regularly shaped galaxy,’ Chiaberge said.
‘Black holes reside in the center of galaxies, so it’s unusual to see a quasar not in the center.’