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> "This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. Like so many of the most interesting discoveries.
I suspect they make huge part of dark matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you like such ideas I have a couple good books for you. Not exactly related to this phenomenon but about space...logistics? With regard ET threats especially. [1] The Three-Body Problem (trilogy) [2] A Fire Upon the Deep If you don't want to read the books at least check out the idea of the "Zones of Thought" that is the interesting concept in the second book.
Strong second for A Fire Upon the Deep and its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, both Hugo winners.
What I don’t understand is where the material for the stars is coming from? Is there that much dust in deep space? Or did it collect it from the galaxy?
Discarded material from the accretion disc, or (well, more likely) material that was more loosely gravitationally bound. A galactic core has a lot of mass that could be stolen.
For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
This is almost the exact premise of Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
> Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole... One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.
I'm obviously not an expert, and this comment is obviously way off the topic, but allow me to wonder: If one supermassive black hole like the our Sagittarius A* can be that dominance, isn't this makes the black hole the most important "asset" of the galaxy? By that, I mean, if you somehow destroyed the back hole (which is what Kurzgesagt was trying to convince people to do, hehe), the galaxy will fall a part, assuming the bulge alone don't have enough gravity to hold the galaxy together.
If you let me expand this a little: So if there are advanced alien civilizations in our galaxy, maybe they want to take control of that black hole? Since that location is the only location unique in the entire galaxy.
If I can expand this a little further: As we human currently observed it, Sagittarius A* is currently quite stable (???) with no sign of disappearing. Can this suggest that in our galaxy there is not a single civilization advanced enough to (or want to) modify Sagittarius A* in a significant way, or maybe black hole just cannot be influenced easily even for a higher tier civilization (maybe wormhole is too hard too)?
I know I missed many details. It's just a shower thought first came out after I docked at a space station few light years away from Sagittarius A* in the game Elite Dangerous. Throwing the idea out there.
BTW: If someone is going to write a novel based on this, you need to pay for the idea up front :)
> This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. > Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole... One of the black holes robbed momentum…
It is also possible, that they don't want to modify the black hole, because it is working as intended?
Why would we change the sun, even if we could?
But apart from that, yes, a civilisation would need to bery very, very advanced to significantly alter a black hole, like the one at the center of our galaxy.
> This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. > Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole... One of the black holes robbed momentum…
So my intuition is your novel would need to ignore a few physical facts, but its fiction after all :D
If you lived on a planet going around one of those stars it sure would be hard to make sense of the universe. "Oh I have it! In addition to all the incomprehensible things in the universe, we happen to live in a star system that is extremely, extremely rare and exeptional, unlike the rest of the universe!"
Asimov's Nightfall tells the story of the beings living on a planet surrounded by 6 suns. The sky is always bright with at least a sun over head. They've only known the universe consisted of bright sky and the 6 suns for centuries. On a rare eclipse event where all the suns are hidden, they are suddenly in darkness and looking into billions of stars at the night sky.
For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
Did you mean a double star system? Or something like Earth-Moon where the size difference between the two bodies is much lesser?