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 d...
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