Artist’s conception of how the “nearly naked” supermassive black hole originated. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
Smaller galaxy loses nearly all its stars, gas during passage through larger neighbor. Astronomers using the super-sharp radio vision of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have found the shredded remains of a galaxy that passed through a larger galaxy, leaving only the smaller galaxy’s nearly-naked supermassive black hole to emerge and speed away at more than 2,000 miles per second. The galaxies are part of a cluster of galaxies more than 2 billion light-years from Earth. The remaining black hole and a small galactic remnant is only ~3,000 light-years across. For comparison, our Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years across.
The discovery was made as part of a program to detect supermassive black holes, millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun, that are not at the centers of galaxies. Supermassive black holes reside at the centers of most galaxies. Large galaxies are thought to grow by devouring smaller companions. In such cases, the black holes of both are expected to orbit each other, eventually merging. “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, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “Instead, we found this black hole fleeing from the larger galaxy and leaving a trail of debris behind it,” he added. “We’ve not seen anything like this before,” Condon said.
The astronomers began their quest by using the VLBA to make very high resolution images of more than 1,200 galaxies, previously identified by large-scale sky surveys done with infrared and radio telescopes. Their VLBA observations showed that the supermassive black holes of nearly all these galaxies were at the centers of the galaxies. However, one object, in a cluster of galaxies called ZwCl 8193, did not fit that pattern. Further studies showed that this object, B3 1715+425, is a supermassive black hole surrounded by a galaxy much smaller and fainter than would be expected. In addition, this object is speeding away from the core of a much larger galaxy, leaving a wake of ionized gas behind it.
The speeding remnant, the scientists said, probably will lose more mass and cease forming new stars. “In a billion years or so, it probably will be invisible,” Condon said. That means that there could be many more such objects left over from earlier galactic encounters that astronomers can’t detect. They’re observing more objects, in a long-term project with the VLBA. Since their project is not time-critical, Condon explained, they use “filler time” when the telescope is not in use for other observations.
“The data we get from the VLBA is very high quality. We get the positions of the supermassive black holes to extremely good precision. Our limiting factor is the precision of the galaxy positions seen at other wavelengths that we use for comparison,” Condon said. With new optical telescopes that will come on line in future years, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), he said, they will then have improved images that can be compared with the VLBA images. They hope that this will allow them to discover more objects like B3 1714+425.
“And also maybe some of the binary supermassive black holes we originally sought,” he said. https://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/nearly-naked-supermassive-black-hole
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