A super-massive black hole — heavier than one billion suns — appears headed on an exit out of its home galaxy at 670,000 miles-an-hour.
“We have located a peculiar X-ray source,” says the upcoming study in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal, led by Marianne Heida of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, “either a very blue type IIn supernova, a (X-ray star) with a very bright optical counterpart or a recoiling super-massive black hole.”
Noted by NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescope, the object called CXO J122518.6+144545 resides some 607,000 light years away in the SDSS DR7 galaxy (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.) Curiously, the object is about 10,500 light years outside the center of the galaxy, marked by an accompanying bright spot in the sky, noted by Hubble space telescope images.
Full story: Monster black hole ejected from host galaxy