The Galaxy.
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Pixabay / lumina_obscura
A supermassive black hole has completely evaporated from NASA's radar screens, according to a study published in the
AAS Journal
, reports
Numerama
.
The celestial object should have been at the heart of the “Abell 2261” cluster of galaxies, 2.7 billion light years from Earth.
But no trace of the black hole, weighing between 3 and 100 billion times the weight of the Sun, has been found by scientists after several successive searches.
A situation deemed abnormal by NASA.
"Since the mass of a central black hole generally follows the mass of the galaxy itself, astronomers expect the galaxy at the center of 'Abell 2261" to also contain a supermassive black hole that rivals the weight of some of the largest known black holes in the universe, ”notes, puzzled, the US space agency.
Merger of two black holes?
How to explain such an absence?
One of the hypotheses is that the black hole of "Abell 2261" would have been ejected from the center of its galaxy after the merger of two other galaxies and their two central black holes.
The gravitational waves resulting from such an event would thus have caused the "retreat" of the disappeared black hole.
A theory that remains only a hypothesis, astronomers have never observed until now a fusion of black holes so large.
The area concerned has so far been studied using two NASA space telescopes, the Chandra and Hubble X-ray observatory, specifies
Numerama
.
The future James Webb telescope may be able to shed light on the presence or absence of this mysterious black hole.
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Astronomy
Galaxy
Science
Nasa
Disappearance
Black hole