Monday, March 15, 2021

Wandering Black Holes?

 Supermassive black holes are the anchors of galaxies. They're the gravitational source that keeps a galaxy together.

Which means that while they do move very slowly, they generally sit in the middle of the galaxy and are orbited by everything else.

Except when they're not.

Spiral galaxy J0437+2456 (yeah, sorry for the mouthful of catalog number), which is 228 million light years away, appears to have a central black hole that is wobbling. And we're not sure why. This could be the aftermath of a galactic collision.

Or it could be evidence of something that theoretically should be happening but that we've never found: A binary pair of supermassive black holes.

Hopefully we'll work it out, but in the mean time, at least we can trust our supermassive black hole to stay firmly put.

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