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Most large galaxies like our own Galaxy have a supermassive black hole in the center. It's so common that astronomers just expect to run across the telltale signs of a black pigsty in the middle of galaxies. But a new observation of a galaxy some viii billion lite years away is dissimilar. Oh, information technology has a supermassive blackness pigsty, only it'southward non in the heart. Fifty-fifty more than fascinating: Information technology's moving. Researchers from Johns Hopkins Academy believe this unusual situation is the result of the nigh unfathomable energy released when two black holes collided.

The image above (taken by the Hubble Space Telescope) shows the blackness pigsty in question — a quasar chosen 3C 186. A quasar is the name given to the bright ring of gas orbiting a large black hole. The black hole itself is, of course, invisible. This one is estimated to be 1 billion times more massive than the dominicus. You can tell from even a cursory inspection that the quasar is nowhere about the center of the galaxy. It'southward actually well-nigh 35,000 light years away. That's over a third the bore of the unabridged Galaxy.

The team confirmed the bright spot is really the a quasar in the galaxy, not simply an object between u.s. and the milky way. Additionally, the ruby shift of this object tells us it'southward moving — fast. It's blasting abroad from the center of the galaxy at more than 1,300 miles per second (ii,000 km per second). By comparison, our solar system orbits effectually the Milky way at roughly 15 miles per second (24 km per second).

It would take an incredible amount of energy to accelerate something that weighs as much as a billion suns to such high speed. In fact, the only explanation that seems to fit is a collision with another supermassive blackness pigsty. Upon closer examination of the image, astronomers identified some arc-shaped features called "tidal tails." These indicate the one milky way we're looking at is actually two, and they probably both had supermassive black holes.

The current thinking is that the interaction of these 2 black holes is what caused the quasar ejection. Equally two huge objects arroyo each other, they whirl around each other, throwing off intense gravitational waves every bit they get closer. If at that place'south an disproportion — maybe 1 black hole is a lot larger than the other or spins much faster — that can cause a net propulsive force in i direction. This is likely what caused 3C 186 to shoot off like information technology did. Researchers believe this sort of imbalance is extremely rare, so we are quite lucky to have spotted it.