A short distance cosmically, but enough for the Earth and the solar system to take advantage.
Avi Blizovsky
A NASA illustration illustrating how the black hole was blown off course and moving through space.
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The fastest moving black hole in the galaxy appears to be moving towards our region. The super massive object moves at a speed of 400 thousand kilometers per hour, 4 times the average speed of stars in its area. But the inhabitants of the earth can relax. It is now 6,000 light-years away from us, and will probably never shock our cosmic environment. "It looks like it will miss us by a thousand light years," said Ray Willard, spokesman for the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, which participated in the discovery of the black hole he named GRO J1655-40.
"I don't know if it will get closer in the future, but the interstellar distance is so great that it almost certainly won't get close enough to affect the solar system," says Willard. However, in astronomical terms, the distance is quite small, compared for example to the width of the Milky Way galaxy which reaches 90 thousand light years.
Felix Mirabel, lead scientist on the black hole project, believes that GRO J1655-40 formed in the nucleus of the Milky Way, the source of stars in our galaxy. Like a cannonball, a massive supernova explosion blasted the black hole and sent it wandering in our general direction. Miraval and his colleagues published the report in the November 19 issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"This is the black hole we are discovering because it is flying fast through the galactic plane," says Miraval, an astronomer at the French Center for Atomic Energy and the Institute of Astronomy and Space in Argentina. "Such a cannonball has been predicted in theory, but GRO J1655-40 is the first to be found in the real universe," Miraval said.
Scientists were able to track the flying black hole by tracking its companion star, a red giant from which GRO J1655-40 is constantly siphoning material.
Black holes are regions of space so compressed that even light cannot escape. Those with masses between 3.5 and 15 solar masses originate from stars that have collapsed in on themselves. There are also supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, including the center of the Milky Way. They have masses of millions or even billions of suns.
Below is the first news from 19/11/2002
A black hole in our galactic environment moves at a speed of 400 thousand km
A large black hole close to us acts as a giant cannonball in the core of our galaxy. The discovery of this fast demon is the best evidence yet for black holes with stellar masses. Its mass is only a few times that of the Sun and it was formed when a massive star explodes in a violent supernova.
The black hole, called GRO J1655-40, moves through space at a speed of 400 thousand kilometers per hour, 4 times faster than the average speed of the stars in its galactic environment. At such a speed, the black hole may have been thrown into space by the supernova explosion.
Even so, by definition, a black hole absorbs light, but the black hole has a companion star and this allows NASA to track it. The improved and sharp systems of the Hubble Space Telescope measured the movement of the black hole in space in 1996 and 2001.
For information on the Hubble Space Telescope website
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