Supermassive black hole says sayonara

A supermassive black hole was removed from its galaxy by a burst of gravitational radiation. Researchers state that black holes around this size and bigger can actually be ejected from their own galaxy where they were created.  Some evidence suggests that not only every large galaxy houses a supermassive black hole at its core, but that a galaxy’s center of stars grows in lockstep with the mass of the black hole. I think this is very interesting because it would improve our understandings of galactic formations. I also did not know that it was possible for a galaxy to eject something from itself. I thought this because of the large amount of gravity within a galaxy which keeps everything within itself intact and inside its perimeter. This event has one problem with it. The scientists also found a strange third emission line, which leaves a big question mark on their work. I found out that an emission lines are photons reemitted in a narrow frequency range from gas that are not in their original photon source. "The strange third emission line is also narrow but bluer in color than the other narrow line." I also found this interesting because the two colors show that they may be looking at the position of two separate quasars that have similar but not identical distances. What that means is that if this is true then the thought of a recoiling black hole would not be correct. It would be devastating if the recoiling black hole was incorrect because this event would help us understand a lot of things.

I got this information from:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/download/id/31611/name/Kicked_to_the_curb

NASA Spacecraft Ready To Explore Outer Solar System

Yesterday, NASA launched its first spacecraft to image and map the dynamic interactions taking place where the hot solar wind slams into the cold expanse of space. It will start its two-year mission at Kwajalein Atoll which is a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The spacecraft is called IBEX which stands for Interstellar Boundary Explorer. The spacecraft will conduct high-altitude orbits above Earth to investigate and take pictures of processes taking place at the farthest reaches of the solar system. Known as the interstellar boundary, this area marks where the solar system meets interstellar space. The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth's orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous," said David J. McComas, IBEXs principal investigator. Other spacecraft have continued the exploration of the interstellar boundary region. Recently, a pair of NASA sun-focused satellites detected a higher-energy version of the particles IBEX will observe in the heliosphere. The heliosphere is an region that contains the solar wind. It stretches from the sun to a distance several times the orbit of Pluto. "What makes the IBEX mission unique is that it has an extra kick during launch. An extra solid-state motor pushes the spacecraft further out of low-Earth orbit where the Pegasus launch vehicle leaves it" stated Willis Jenkins, IBEX program executive at NASA Headquarters. The IBEX mission is the next in NASA's series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers spacecraft. The mission was developed by Southwest Research Institute with national and international partner participation. IBEX is poised to thoroughly map this interstellar boundary region of the solar system. The pictures will let scientists understand the global interaction between our sun and the galaxy for the very first time.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/ExploringTheOuterSolarSystem.html

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/280780main_LandDLg.jpg

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