Mystery of Missing Rogue Black Holes May Be Solved

Mystery of Missing Rogue Black Holes May Be Solved

Thursday, May 31, 2007

By Jeanna Bryner

An artist's impression of a supermassive black hole being ejected from its host galaxy, taking its accretion disk along with it.

An artist's impression of a supermassive black hole being ejected from its host galaxy, taking its accretion disk along with it.

HONOLULU — A runaway black hole pummeling through space at more than 2 billion miles per hour should be as easy to spot as a dog dragging along its leash and stake.

Blazing trails of X-rays, produced by material getting sucked into the voracious beast, would be a dead giveaway of the escapee. Merged galaxies missing their black holes, sort of "empty nests," should also be quite frequent.

But astronomers searching for such evidence have come up empty-handed, suggesting ejected black holes are less common than theory has predicted.

Two teams of astronomers presented research here Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society revealing which galaxies could be potential launch platforms for an ousted black hole, as well as reasons why ejectees are so rare.

Runaway black holes

Theoretical calculations show that the black holes of two colliding galaxies should fall to the center of the resulting combined galaxy, where they would whip around each other and slowly emit radiation.

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