The story: April 2019, Space Telescope Science Institute Astronomer Marc PostmanAccording to Hubble, when he saw the Hubble Hubble image of the giant elliptical galaxy galaxies in the Abell 2261 cluster galaxy cluster, with a central core that was larger and brighter than anything before, he immediately knew something was wrong. It is approximately ten-thousand times the size of our Milky Way Galaxy and measures in at a little more than one million light-years.
The Central Region is a vast, diffuse region
The bloated galaxie is an uncommon member of a class of galaxies that are filled with starlight. This fog covers the area where there would be a concentrated peak in light around a supermassive blackhole. The central region is much larger than astronomers would expect for the galaxy’s size, with a bloated core more than three times larger than the center of other very luminous galaxies.
The mass of a central Black Hole is often in line with the mass the galaxy, according to reports Chandra Space ObservatoryAstronomers predict that the galaxy (image below), located in the center Abell 2261, will have a supermassive Black Hole. This would rival the weight of other known black holes in our Universe.
The supermassive star that controls galaxy evolution was absent.
“The core was very diffuse. The challenge was then to make sense of all the data, given what we knew from previous Hubble observations, and come up with a plausible explanation for the intriguing nature of this particular galaxy,” said Postman. Postman is leading a multi-wavelength survey of the Abell 2261 Cluster. Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey With Hubble (CLASH). This survey examines dark matter distribution in 25 large galaxy clusters.
The authors concluded that there is either no black hole in any of these locations or that the material is being pulled in too slowly to generate an X-ray signal.
“Expecting to find a black hole in every galaxy is sort of like expecting to find a pit inside a peach”
“Expecting to find a black hole in every galaxy is sort of like expecting to find a pit inside a peach,” added astronomer Tod LauerNational Optical Astronomy Observatory. “With this Hubble observation, we cut into the biggest peach and we can’t find the pit. We don’t know for sure that the black hole is not there, but Hubble shows that there’s no concentration of stars in the core.”
Still, No Evidence…
Astronomers have not yet been able to find evidence of a distant blackhole, which is estimated to weigh between 3 and 100 billion billion tons and be approximately the same mass as the Sun. Using Chandra data obtained in 1999 and 2004 astronomers had already searched the center of Abell 2261’s large central galaxy for signs of a supermassive black hole. They tried to find material that had been superheated when it fell towards the black holes and produced Xrays. However, they did not find such a source.
Collision-ejected?
A team of researchers led byKayhan GultekinThe University of Michigan did a deeper search to find the black hole. They also considered an alternative explanation, in which the black hole was ejected from the host galaxy’s center. This could have occurred when two galaxies merged to form the observed star, with the central black holes in each galaxy merging into one huge black hole.
Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime that occur when black holes combine. The theory states that if the gravitational waves produced by such an event were stronger than others, it would mean that the new, larger black hole would have traveled in the opposite direction. This is known as a recoiling dark hole.
Is the Story Embedded In Gravitational Waves
Astronomers have yet to find definitive evidence of recoiling black hole and it isn’t known if supermassive blacks even get close enough together to produce gravitational wave and merge. So far, astronomers only have confirmed the mergers with smaller black holes. Scientists could be inspired to develop observatories and use them to study gravitational waves produced by merging supermassive dark holes.
“The Red Quasar” -Galactic Beasts Powered By Supermassive Black Holes
Because there are two indirect indicators that a merger of two large black holes may have occurred, the galaxy located at the center Abell 2261 makes it an ideal cluster to search for one. First, data from the Hubble and Subaru optical observations reveal a galactic core — the central region where the number of stars in the galaxy in a given patch of the galaxy is at or close to the maximum value — that is much larger than expected for a galaxy of its size. The second sign is the fact that the galaxy’s center is more than 2,000 light-years away. This is a strikingly distant distance.
These features were first seen by Postman and his collaborators in earlier Hubble images and Subaru images. This led them to propose the idea of Abell 2261 as a merged blackhole.
Gargantuan Black Hole:
When a galaxy merges, the supermassive dark hole in each galaxy sinks towards the center of the newly formed galaxy. They will interact with other stars to expel them from the center of their galaxy if they become entangled by gravity. This would explain Abell 2261’s large core. A violent event like the merger of two supermassive, black holes and subsequent repulsion of a single larger black hole could have caused the off-center concentration stars.
Although there are some clues that a blackhole merger occurred, neither Chandra nor Hubble data offered evidence of the black hole. Gultekin and many of his co-authors were led by Sarah Burke-SpolaorFrom West Virginia University, they had used Hubble before to search for a cluster of stars that could have been carried away by a black hole. They examined three clumps located near the centre of the galaxy and determined if the motions of the stars in these clumps suggest a ten million solar mass black hole. Two clumps did not contain any evidence of a black hole, and stars in the third one were too faint for them to draw any useful conclusions.
They also used the Abell 2261 observation data to make their observations. NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array.Radio emission found near the centre of the galaxy provided evidence of supermassive activity 50 million year ago. It does not however indicate that the galaxy’s center is home to such an active black hole.
They turned to Chandra to search for superheated material, which produced Xrays as the material fell towards a black hole. While the Chandra data did reveal that the densest hot gas was not in the center of the galaxy, they did not reveal any possible X-ray signatures of a growing supermassive black hole — no X-ray source was found in the center of the cluster, or in any of the clumps of stars, or at the site of the radio emission.
The ejected black-hole scenario may sound far-fetched, “but that’s what makes observing the Universe so intriguing—sometimes you find the unexpected.”
The Conclusion
The authors concluded that there is either no black hole in any of these locations or that the material is being pulled in too slowly to generate an X-ray signal.
Postman’s team admits that the ejected black-hole scenario may sound far-fetched, “but that’s what makes observing the Universe so intriguing—sometimes you find the unexpected,” he says.
“This is a system that’s interesting enough that it pushes against a lot of questions,” Lauer added. “We have thought an awful lot about what black holes do. But we haven’t been able to test our theories. This is an interesting place where a lot of the ideas we’ve had can come together and can be tested, fairly exotic ideas about how black holes may interact with each other dynamically and how they would affect the surrounding stellar population.”
The Mystery Continues
So the mystery of this gigantic black hole’s location continues. The Chandra Observatory concluded that the search for the supermassive black holes was in vain. However, there is still hope for future astronomers.
Lauer said that there is hope. The Daily GalaxyOnce launched on December 18, 20,21, the James Webb Space Telescope might be able reveal the presence of either a supermassive Black hole in the centre of the galaxy or one the clumps.
Maxwell Moe, NASA Einstein FellowUniversity of Arizona via Arxiv.org, Chandra X-Ray Observatory Hubble Site
Maxwell Moe (astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow University of Arizona), Maxwell Moe Max is often found at Kitt Peak National Observatory two nights per week, exploring the mysteries of the Universe. Max received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2015 in Astronomy.
