Posted on 02/06/2017 5:58:14 PM PST by MtnClimber
A chance observation in a corner of the Milky Way galaxy could hint at a hidden black hole.
A cloud travelling in a corner of our galaxy at a blistering 100 kilometres per second likely harbours a black hole, according to Japanese astronomers.
Masaya Yamada and colleagues from Keio University mapped the motion and appearance of the fast-moving feature – nicknamed the "Bullet" – and concluded that its shape and velocity can be attributed to a black hole hiding within.
The work, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal, outlines one of only a few such "quiet" black holes found in the Milky Way so far.
Black holes, which don't let any light escape their gravitational clutches – aside from Hawking radiation – are generally detected from their effects on other, visible objects.
For instance, astronomers deduced the location of the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole from the movement of a single star around the centre of our galaxy.
It's not just stars that give away a black hole's location. Clouds of gas and stellar debris can do so too – such as the Bullet, outlined by Yamada and colleagues in their paper.
They discovered the Bullet while investigating the shell of an exploded star, a supernova, nearly 10,000 light-years from Earth. They noticed a cloud, around two light-years across, moving extremely quickly against the motion its surrounds.
When they examined the cloud closely with the Atacama Submillimetre Telescope Experiment's 10-metre telescope in Chile and the Nobeyama 45-metre telescope in Japan, they picked out a couple of weird features.
The Bullet isn't in the shape of an actual bullet; rather, it splits into a Y-shape. And while most of it is expanding at 50 kilometres per second, its tip is travelling at 120 kilometres per second.
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmosmagazine.com ...
Pretty close astronomically. I wonder what the direction of travel is relative to us. A black hole could ruin the neighborhood and that is not racist.
“In 2002, astronomers calculated there should be up to a billion black holes in the Milky Way, but scant few candidates – only around 60 – have been found.”
Time to get right with God?
Some will never get it.
Getting vacuumed up will be suboptimal...
” The Bullet isn’t in the shape of an actual bullet; rather, it splits into a Y-shape. And while most of it is expanding at 50 kilometres per second, its tip is travelling at 120 kilometres per second.”
Cosmic water dowser headed towards a source of water.
120 kilometres per second will vaporize any water it finds. And all nearby star syatems.
>A cloud traveling in a corner of our galaxy at a blistering 100 kilometers per second likely harbors a black hole, according to Japanese astronomers.
Stop right there. Is it gaining on US or leaving US?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnjV7qIPVsA
60 miles a second is “blistering”? Mercury speeds around the sun at about 30 miles a second.
then that douses the need for water.
It was a quiet, intense gravitational field but kept to itself, something of a loner—unless you got too close.
Is the light-shift to the red or to the violet?
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