Post

Space news is the best. Like, what do you mean there's a runaway supermassive black hole 10 million times bigger than the sun moving through space at 2 million miles per hour www.space.com/astronomy/bl...

space.comJames Webb Space Telescope confirms 1st 'runaway' supermassive black hole rocketing through 'Cosmic Owl' galaxies at 2.2 million mph: 'It boggles the mind!'"The forces that are needed to dislodge such a massive black hole from its home are enormous."

517 reposts1.7K likes

This is incredibly cool. However, I still laughed like Beavis and Butthead when I read: “The velocity of the displaced gas is directly related to the velocity of the black hole”

I assume that when they say it is 10 million times larger than the sun they mean it is 10 million times more massive, not that it has 10 million times the diameter?

You're right, but that's because my estimate was *way* too small. A sphere 10 million times the radius of the sun contains the volume of 1 sextillion suns (10^21). The milky way contains roughly 1 trillion solar masses, so it could contain 1 billion milky ways as dense as the sun.

That’s some crazy stuff that goes on with supermassive black holes. To someone watching from a distance it would appear the earth moved slower and slower and then basically froze in time. For a sufficiently massive black hole, the tidal forces wouldn’t be that noticeable…