Tuesday - May 06, 2008

Huge Black Hole Kicked Out Of Universe, Hillary Loves The Concept

Since Steamboat McGoo is on a road trip this week and thus unable to blog, I figured I’d try my hand at his style of posting. Hey, this is fun!

A colossal black hole has been spotted exiting its home galaxy, kicked out after a huge cosmic merger took place.  The event, seen for the first time, was announced last week. When two colliding galaxies finally merge, it is thought that the black holes at their cores may fuse together too.  Astronomers have theorized that the resulting energy release could propel the new black hole from its parent galaxy out into space, but no one has found such an event.

“We have observed the pre-merger stages of black holes,” said Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, part of the team that made the new discovery. “But we haven’t seen the actual merger event.”

Komossa and her team have now detected the consequences of such a merger: a 100-million-solar mass black hole in the process of leaving its home galaxy.

“The consequence was that the merged black hole, the final product, the new black hole was expelled from the galaxy,” Komossa said.

The team’s results are detailed in the May 10 issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Our own Milky Way contains the debris of the many smaller galaxies it has brushed against and devoured in the past. And it hasn’t stopped munching away at its neighbors: It is currently absorbing the Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy.

The Milky Way isn’t the top predator though, as our giant neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is expected to devour the Milky Way in about two billion years. The future resulting elliptical galaxy has already been dubbed “Milkomeda.”

Though colliding galaxies rush towards each other at hundreds of kilometers per hour, the interactions can take hundreds of millions of years to complete.

This game of celestial bumper cars is driven by the gravitational pulls that galaxies exert on one another. Typically the first sign of a collision is a bridge of matter connecting two galaxies as gravity’s first gentle tugs tease out dust and gas. As the outer reaches of the galaxies begin to interact, long streamers of gas and dust, called tidal tails, sweep back to wrap around the galactic cores.

The only thing missing from these articles is some vector info about the runaway black hole. Since they don’t tell which way it’s going, that can only mean that it’s headed straight at us. We’re all gonna die!!!

To make you feel a little better while you ponder your doom, here is some smut.

Arp 148, nicknamed Mayall’s object, is the aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the center and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. Arp 148 is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away.

Yeah, sure, sometimes a galaxy is just a galaxy, but this looks naughty to me, whether Mayall objects or not. “aftermath” indeed ... looks more like a “during”. 

CLOSE IT UP ...

Posted by Drew458     on 05/06/2008 at 11:20 AM   
Filed Under: • Amazing Science and Discoveries • Eye-Candy • Fun-Stuff •  
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