The strange object was discovered by astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a network of ten 25-meter dish antennas located around the world and operated out of New Mexico.
“We were looking for orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes, with one offset from the center of a galaxy, as telltale evidence of a previous galaxy merger,”
said James Condon, the astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who led the study. “Instead, we found this black hole fleeing from the larger galaxy and leaving a trail of debris behind it.”
The working theory is that millions of years ago, B3 1715+425's galaxy passed through a much larger galaxy (one that had formed during many previous mergers) and got shredded to bits, a bit like a paper airplane flying into a hurricane. The leftovers include a faint galactic remnant, just 3,000 light years across, and the supermassive black hole itself, nearly naked and hemorrhaging ionized gas as it tears through the void.
Astronomers believe the cosmic carnage will become invisible in about a billion years, as the galactic remnant ceases to form new stars.
“We’ve not seen anything like this before,” Condon said.
Have other galaxies and supermassive black holes met the same unfortunate fate? It seems likely. Condon and his team will continue to investigate the matter using the VLBA, and with high-resolution optical telescopes in the future.
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