With the help of a large "telescope", the VLBA radio interferometer, American and Russian astronomers studied the consequences of the collision of two galaxies. Scientists noticed that one of them destroyed a smaller neighbor, revealing a supermassive black hole at its center.
Both galaxies belong to a distant cluster 2 billion light years from Earth, and their convergence began several million years ago, leaving the smaller galaxy virtually starless, gas and dust free. Its dimensions are only about 3 percent of the size of our Milky Way, and practically nothing covers the active center of the galaxy, where the supermassive black hole is located.
It was these objects that James Condon and his colleagues from the United States and Russia were interested in: it is assumed that large galaxies grow, actively absorbing their neighbors. At the same time, their black holes grow, merging with each other. Therefore, astronomers, using the VLBA radio interferometer, searched for pairs of such holes rotating around each other, which could indicate a merger of galaxies. And the picture they found in the ZwCl 8193 cluster was rather unexpected.
The object B3 1715 + 425 located in it turned out to be an almost "naked" supermassive black hole, which is surrounded by a very faint halo of stars and dust - and all this at a speed of thousands of kilometers per second flies away from the center of a large galaxy, leaving a trail of ionized gas. James Condon and his colleagues suggested that this was the end of the "journey" of a small galaxy through a larger one, into which it crashed several million years ago. Almost all of its substance was pulled over by the gravity of a large galaxy, and only the supermassive black hole and its closest neighbors continue to move on.
The emergence of a "naked" supermassive black hole through the eyes of an artist
Photo: Bill Saxton, NRAO / AUI / NSF
The fate of the remains of the galaxy is unenviable. The small amounts of rarefied matter that remained with it are unlikely to provide material for the appearance of new stars. Scientists believe that somewhere in a billion years, when its stars burn out, it will finally go out and become invisible.
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Sergey Vasiliev
