Can a supermassive black hole of titanic proportions be ejected from its galaxy? A team of NASA astronomers has discovered that a black hole wanders only through space after being banished from the center of its galaxy, 3C 186, due to the power of gravitational waves produced by – possibly – the merger of two black holes.
This imposing black hole (with a weight of 1 billion stars like our Sun and the most massive one detected being ejected from its host galaxy), according to observations made through the Hubble Space Telescope , is going at 7.5 million kilometers per hour. wandering through space, and leaves nothing in its path: it devours everything, and at this speed, according to experts, it would take less than 3 minutes to get from the Earth to the Moon.
Is it heading towards us?
It is true that the wandering black hole is heading towards the Milky Way, our galaxy, but there is no fear that we will be another snack along the way , since it still has several billion years to reach us.
Despite this, scientists find it fascinating how this colossal black hole could have been exiled from its galaxy, since it would have required an energy equivalent to 100 million supernovae exploding simultaneously. The most likely scenario is that when these two black holes collided and merged, the resulting black hole would have shot out in the opposite direction to the gravitational waves.
The phenomenon is located 8 billion light-years away from Earth in a galactic cluster and scientists hope to again use the Hubble telescope, in combination with the ALMA telescope and other facilities, to more accurately measure the speed of the black hole and its gas disk, which may give more information about the nature of this strange object.
