For the past few days, we’ve all been fawning over the glorious new image of our Milky Way’s black hole. But for a moment, we might want to pause and pay our respects to a lonely chasm across the universe that might’ve been booted from its own galaxy.
On Thursday — the same day the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration brought us a visceral picture of Sagittarius A* — astronomers announced that somewhere in the cosmos, two black holes could’ve merged with enough force to literally kick the resulting void out of sight.
Yes, that means there could be a monstrous abyss plunging through the universe right now. But don’t panic.
“Space is just incredibly vast. The probability that black hole will run into something else is very low,” said Vijay Varma, a postdoctoral researcher at Albert Einstein Institute and lead author of a study on the forsaken void published May 12 in Physical Review Letters. “Practically speaking, it’s just a free black hole that will not do anything.”
And, according to Varma, there’s a solid chance this merger, dubbed GW200129, only sort of half-blasted the baby black hole from its home. “It’s not known that the black hole necessarily got ejected from its host galaxy,” he said. “What we can say more confidently is that if the black hole was formed in these clusters of stars called globular clusters… it very likely got ejected from the cluster.”
In other words, the expunged abyss could’ve circumvented complete isolation — but it’s almost definitely on some type of hyper-speed cosmic voyage.
