What Happens When Supermassive Black Holes Collide?

As galaxies merge together, you might be wondering what happens with the supermassive black holes that lurk at their centres. Just imagine the forces unleashed as two black holes with hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun come together. The answer will surprise you. Fortunately, it’s an event that we should be able to detect from here on Earth, if we know what we’re looking for.

Most, if not all, galaxies in the Universe seem to contain supermassive blackholes. Some of the biggest can contain hundreds of millions, or even billions of times the mass of our own Sun. And the environments around them can only be called “extreme”. Researchers think that many could be spinning at the maximum rates predicted by Einstein’s theories of relativity – a significant fraction of the speed of light.

As two galaxies merge, their supermassive black holes have to eventually interact. Either through a direct collision, or by spiraling inward until they eventually merge as well.

And that’s when things get interesting.

According to simulations made by G.A. Shields from the University of Texas, Austin, and E.W. Bonning, from Yale University, the result is often a powerful recoil. Instead of coming together nicely, the forces are so extreme that one black holes is kicked away at a tremendous velocity.

The maximum kick happens with the two black holes are spinning in opposite directions, but they’re on the same orbital plane – imagine two spinning tops coming together. In a fraction of a second, one black hole is given enough of a kick to send it right out of the newly merged galaxy, never to return.

As one black hole is given a kick, the other receives a tremendous amount of energy, injected into the disk of gas and dust surrounding it. The accretion disk will blaze with a soft X-ray flare that should last thousands of years.

So even though mergers between supermassive black holes are extremely rare events, the afterglow lasts long enough that we should be able to detect a large number out there in space right now. The researchers estimate that there could be as many as 100 of these recent recoil events happening within 5 billion light-years of the Earth.

Their recently updated journal article, entitled Powerful Flares from Recoiling Black Holes in Quasars will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysics Journal.

Original Source: Arxiv