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https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1141188
EXCERPTS: In September 2022, astronomers noticed a perplexing feature on an image of a galaxy around 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. A thin line stretching over 202,000 light-years pointed directly away from the galaxy’s center. Its leading edge was an unresolved point, with no detectable stars, speeding away at nearly 1,000 kilometers per second.
The scientists who spotted it interpreted the feature as a super-massive black hole plowing through intergalactic space, triggering star formation in its wake. Now researchers from UC Santa Barbara and University of Texas at Austin have published a paper on the violent event that could have shot this behemoth from its host galaxy.
The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, provide the first account of a class of black hole mergers predicted by general relativity, and will help scientists prepare for the next generation of gravitational wave observatories.
Merging black holes produce strong gravitational waves as the massive objects warp spacetime and spiral into each other. If the system is lopsided, these waves can generate enough of a kick to launch the newly formed, larger black hole in an entirely different trajectory, “like the recoil of a fired cannon,” said co-author Tejaswi Venumadhav, an associate professor in UCSB’s Department of Physics.
[...] “The two black holes had to be spinning fast,” explained lead author Tousif Islam, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). “And their spins had to be misaligned.”
[...] Enormous black holes appear to have developed relatively early in the history of the cosmos. But by the time the parents of RBH-1 met more than 7.5 billion years ago, neighboring super-massive black holes would’ve consolidated, leaving a single behemoth at the center of each galaxy. So this pair wouldn’t have encountered each other unless their home galaxies themselves collided... (MORE - missing details, no ads)
EXCERPTS: In September 2022, astronomers noticed a perplexing feature on an image of a galaxy around 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. A thin line stretching over 202,000 light-years pointed directly away from the galaxy’s center. Its leading edge was an unresolved point, with no detectable stars, speeding away at nearly 1,000 kilometers per second.
The scientists who spotted it interpreted the feature as a super-massive black hole plowing through intergalactic space, triggering star formation in its wake. Now researchers from UC Santa Barbara and University of Texas at Austin have published a paper on the violent event that could have shot this behemoth from its host galaxy.
The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, provide the first account of a class of black hole mergers predicted by general relativity, and will help scientists prepare for the next generation of gravitational wave observatories.
Merging black holes produce strong gravitational waves as the massive objects warp spacetime and spiral into each other. If the system is lopsided, these waves can generate enough of a kick to launch the newly formed, larger black hole in an entirely different trajectory, “like the recoil of a fired cannon,” said co-author Tejaswi Venumadhav, an associate professor in UCSB’s Department of Physics.
[...] “The two black holes had to be spinning fast,” explained lead author Tousif Islam, a postdoctoral scholar at UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP). “And their spins had to be misaligned.”
[...] Enormous black holes appear to have developed relatively early in the history of the cosmos. But by the time the parents of RBH-1 met more than 7.5 billion years ago, neighboring super-massive black holes would’ve consolidated, leaving a single behemoth at the center of each galaxy. So this pair wouldn’t have encountered each other unless their home galaxies themselves collided... (MORE - missing details, no ads)