00:00Supermassive Black Holes
00:05They're pretty big. It's right there in the name.
00:07And in galaxy clusters like Abell 2261,
00:10there should be a black hole at the center between
00:123 and 100 billion times the size of our sun,
00:15but there isn't one.
00:16And scientists believe it's either evading detection
00:19due to some mix of starlight and instrumental mishap,
00:21or perhaps more excitingly,
00:23it may have been kicked out of the galaxy cluster
00:25by some currently theoretical means.
00:27When black holes merge,
00:28they send waves of gravitational force across spacetime,
00:31and experts theorized that if those waves
00:33were considerably more powerful in a particular direction,
00:36that gravitational recoil could kick a black hole
00:38in the opposite direction.
00:39So recently, a team of researchers
00:41from the University of Michigan
00:43looked closer at Abell 2261
00:45using the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
00:47They found that the hot gas density decreased
00:49the closer their observations got to the galactic core,
00:51meaning the area around the core
00:53was more dense than the core itself.
00:55But they found no X-radiation,
00:56which you would expect from a black hole.
00:58So either the black hole is there,
01:00but dormant and not feeding,
01:01or indeed it was kicked out of the cluster altogether
01:04and may still be found elsewhere,
01:05out in space.
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