New Delhi:
Astrophysicists have been studying the inception of Black Holes for quite some time now. One theory is that when a massive star collapses upon itself – Supernova – the explosion is so huge that a black hole is born.
A new study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that not only are black holes born in supernova explosions but some explosions are so huge that they kick the black holes across the galaxy.
The research suggests that those explosions are so powerful which travels at speeds greater than 70 kilometres per second (roughly 252,000 kmph).
Pikky Atri of Curtin University and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) told ScienceAlert, "This work basically talks about the first observational evidence that you can actually see black holes moving with high velocities in the galaxy and associate it to the kick the black hole system received at birth’’.
It concludes that there are millions of mass-black holes roaming around our galaxy at high speed.
Once we can see these black hole beacons, we can see how the black hole is behaving. The international team of researchers used this behaviour to try and reconstruct the black hole's history.
"We tracked how these systems were moving in our galaxy - so, figured out their velocities today, moved back in time, and tried to understand what the velocity was of the system when it was born, individually for each of these 16 systems," Atri explained.
"Based on the velocities, you can actually find out if they were born with a supernova explosion, or if the stars just directly collapsed onto themselves without a supernova explosion."
The Milky Way is home to at least 10 million black holes that we know of – so an estimated 7.5 million black holes could be spinning and zooming at high speeds in our own galaxy.
