Rogue black holes may roam at the edge of the Milky Way

Astronomers believe that most galaxies form around supermassive black holes. Gigantic

gravitational objects in millions and billionstimes more massive than the Sun, they act as anchors for the long plumes of gas, dust, stars and planets that orbit around them. Closer to black holes, this material spirals faster and heats up, forming an accretion disk. It feeds the black hole and produces the very radiation that makes it visible.

Usually the mass of these black holes “cements”them in the centers of galaxies that slowly rotate in clusters. But sometimes a huge force—such as a collision between two galaxies—can eject the central supermassive black hole and send it wandering around the Universe. Violation of the process of merging black holes also leads to the fact that one of them becomes “wandering”.

To estimate how often this happens,Astronomers have conducted a series of simulations that take into account all the known characteristics and “rules of behavior” of black holes. The goal is to track how their orbits evolve over billions of years.

Modeling predicted that frequentGalactic collisions in the early Universe between the Big Bang event about 13.7 billion years ago and 2 billion years later gave rise to quite a few “space wanderers.” Their number exceeds the number of supermassive black holes recorded in the center of galaxies. The study showed that there are at least 12 such wandering objects on the outskirts of the Milky Way.

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