Runaway Black Hole in the Milky Way

A runaway black hole is streaking through the Milky Way galaxy, dragging an aging star along to snack on as it heads in Earth's general direction, astronomers reported on November 18.

There is absolutely no need to panic, though: The black hole will get no closer to our solar system than 1,000 light-years, and that will not happen for 200 million years or so. Right now it is between 6,000 and 9,000 light-years away.

A light-year is about 10 trillion kilometers: the distance light travels in a year.

Still, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to track the black hole are excited about it, because it gives them the best evidence yet that it was created when a star several times the mass of our sun blew up in a vast explosion known as a supernova.

Black holes are voracious matter-sucking drains in space that exert so much gravitational force that nothing, not even light, can escape their pull. While black holes themselves cannot be seen, they can be detected by the characteristic swirl of material falling into them.

Most black holes tend to stay put, often at the center of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

Scientists have known for decades that black holes come in a variety of sizes, from supermassive -- with the weight of millions or even billions of suns -- to the much lighter stellar-mass, which is what this runaway object is.

Known to astronomers as GRO J1655-40, the mobile black hole is not just strolling through the plane of the Milky Way. It is rocketing through at 400,000 kilometers an hour, four times faster than the stars in its galactic neighborhood.

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Khorsheed.com – Nov 2002