Supermassive Black Hole Stuns Scientists

Seeing somebody naked and running through your neighborhood at top speed would no doubt catch your attention. Same thing with black holes and astronomers. 

According to a release from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, astronomers spotted the supermassive black hole, dubbed B3 1715+425 alongside remnants of a galaxy that was stripped down after passing through a larger galaxy. 

"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 NRAO representative James Condon said in the release. "Instead, we found this black hole fleeing from the larger galaxy and leaving a trail of debris behind it.”

“We've not seen anything like this before," he added.

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Supermassive black holes typically lie in the center of most galaxies and are millions or billions of times the mass of the sun, reports ScienceAlert. B3 1715+425, in particular, appears to be making a mad dash away from its native galaxy at more than 1200 miles per hour.

The galaxies that led to the stripped down supernova are from a cluster more than 2 billion light-years away, according to the release. The run-in took place millions of years ago, leaving B3 1715+425’s galaxy stripped of nearly all of its stars and gas and leaving a small galactic remnant about 3,000 light-years across, which is small potatoes compared to our 100,000 light-years across Milky Way. 

The discovery was made with the help of the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system of ten remotely-operated radio telescopes.

According to Coleman, the naked galaxy will probably be invisible in about a billion years, meaning there could be many more such objects left over from previous galactic encounters. 

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