Tail of Stray Black Hole Hiding in the Milky Way
Artist’s impression of a stray black hole storming through a dense gas cloud. The gas is dragged along by the strong gravity of the black hole to form a narrow gas stream.
Credit: Keio University
A research team led by Masaya Yamada, a graduate student at Keio University, Japan, and Tomoharu Oka, a professor at Keio University, used the ASTE Telescope in Chile and the 45-m Radio Telescope at Nobeyama Radio Observatory, both operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, to observe molecular clouds around the supernova remnant W44, located 10,000 light-years away from us. Their primary goal was to examine how much energy was transferred from the supernova explosion to the surrounding molecular gas, but they happened to find signs of a hidden black hole at the edge of W44.
During the survey, the team found a compact molecular cloud with enigmatic motion. This cloud, named the “Bullet,” has a speed of more than 100 km/s, which exceeds the speed of sound in interstellar space by more than two orders of magnitude. In addition, this cloud, with the size of two light-years, moves backward against the rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy.
To investigate the origin of the Bullet, the team performed intensive observations of the gas cloud with ASTE and the Nobeyama 45-m Radio Telescope. The data indicate that the Bullet seems to jump out from the edge of the W44 supernova remnant with immense kinetic energy.
“Most of the Bullet has an expanding motion with a speed of 50 km/s, but the tip of the Bullet has a speed of 120 km/s,” said Yamada. “Its kinetic energy is a few tens of times larger than that injected by the W44 supernova. It seems impossible to generate such an energetic cloud under ordinary environments.”
The team proposed two scenarios for the formation of the Bullet. In both cases, a dark and compact gravity source, possibly a black hole, has an important role. One scenario is the “explosion model” in which an expanding gas shell of the supernova remnant passes by a static black hole. The black hole pulls the gas very close to it, giving rise to an explosion, which accelerates the gas toward us after the gas shell has passed the black hole. In this case, the astronomers estimated that the mass of the black hole would 3.5 times the solar mass or larger.
Contacts and sources:
Masaaki Hiramatsu, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Citation: Yamada et al. “Kinematics of Ultra-high-velocity Gas in the Expanding Molecular Shell adjacent to the W44 Supernova Remnant” in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 834, Number 1, article number L3, in January 2017.
Source:
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