With the energy of 100 million supernovae, gravitational waves may have ejected a supermassive black hole from the center of a distant galaxy. <br />The Hubble Space Telescope spotted a rogue black hole that’s said to be the largest yet to be found outside of a galactic core, weighing more than 1 billion suns. <br />Astronomer suspect the ‘monster object’ was kicked out of the center as two large black holes merged, unleashing powerful gravitational waves.The find, according to NASA, was out of the ordinary. <br />‘When I first saw this, I thought we were seeing something very peculiar,’ said team leader Marco Chiaberge of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University. <br />‘When we combined observations from Hubble, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it all pointed towards the same scenario. <br />‘The amount of data we collected, from X-rays to ultraviolet to near-infrared light is definitely larger than for any of the other candidate rogue black holes.’ <br />Hubble images in visible and near-infrared light revealed a bright quasar named 3C 186 in a galaxy 8 billion light-years away. <br />But, the object was far from the galaxy’s core. <br />These are known to be energetic signatures of black holes, and are typically found in the center. <br />‘I was anticipating seeing a lot of merging galaxies, and I was expecting to see messy host galaxies around the quasars, but I wasn’t really expecting to see a quasar that was clearly offset from the core of a regularly shaped galaxy,’ Chiaberge said. <br />‘Black holes reside in the center of galaxies, so it’s unusual to see a quasar not in the center.’
