HomeScience and ResearchScientific ResearchA supermassive black hole mysteriously disappears

A supermassive black hole mysteriously disappears

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NASA scientists fail to find a supermassive black hole in a galaxy in the Abell 2261 cluster. Its estimated mass is 3 billion to 100 billion times of the Sun.

“Despite searching with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have no evidence that this distant black hole can be found,” the US space agency wrote.

It is a black hole, according to astronomers, should be located in the galactic cluster Abell 2261, which is about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth.

At the center of virtually every major galaxy in our universe is a supermassive black hole with a mass of millions or billions of times of the Sun. Since the mass of a central black hole is usually proportional to the mass of the galaxy itself in which they are located, the galaxy in the center of Abell 2261 should contain one of the largest black holes in the universe. But this doesn’t seem to be the case.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have analyzed data collected by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to conduct a deeper search for the black hole at the center of the galaxy in question.

A possible explanation for the disappearance of the supermassive black hole, according to scientists, is that it has been ejected from the interior of the galaxy. This may have occurred after a supposed merger of two galaxies to form the observed galaxy. As part of this process, the central black holes of the two galaxies would come together to form a huge black hole.

“When black holes merge, they produce ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. If the huge amount of gravitational waves generated by such an event were stronger in one direction than another, the theory predicts that the new, even more massive black hole would have been sent careening away from the center of the galaxy in the opposite direction”

explained NASA.

This phenomenon is known as a recoiling black hole. However, astronomers have never found definitive evidence that they actually occur. In addition, it is not known whether supermassive black holes are close enough to each other to produce gravitational waves and merge. At the moment, astronomers have only verified mergers from much smaller black holes.

Although scientists have found clues that a black hole merger occurred in the central galaxy Abell 2261, neither the Chandra nor Hubble data showed evidence for the existence of the black hole itself. “Therefore, the mystery of the location of this gigantic black hole continues,” wrote NASA.

Although the search was not successful, the US space agency believes that there is hope that astronomers looking for this supermassive black hole will find it in the future

Once launched, the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to reveal the presence of the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy or in one of the star clusters around it. If the device cannot find it, then the best explanation is that this black hole has drifted too far from the center of the galaxy.

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