A Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar SDSS J092712.65+294344.0?
- 14 April 2008
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Astronomical Society in The Astrophysical Journal
- Vol. 678 (2), L81-L84
- https://doi.org/10.1086/588656
Abstract
We present SDSS J092712.65+294344.0 as the best candidate to date for a recoiling supermassive black hole (SMBH). SDSS J0927+2943 shows an exceptional optical emission-line spectrum with two sets of emission lines: one set of very narrow emission lines, and a second set of broad Balmer and broad high-ionization forbidden lines which are blueshifted by 2650 km s−1 relative to the set of narrow emission lines. This observation is most naturally explained if the SMBH was ejected from the core of the galaxy, carrying with it the broad-line gas while leaving behind the bulk of the narrow-line gas. We show that the observed properties of SDSS J0927+2943 are consistent with predictions and expectations from recent numerical relativity simulations which demonstrate that SMBHs can receive kicks up to several thousand km s−1 due to anisotropic emission of gravitational waves during the coalescence of a binary. Our detection of a strong candidate for a rapidly recoiling SMBH implies that kicks large enough to remove SMBHs completely from their host galaxies do occur, with important implications for models of black hole and galaxy assembly at the epoch of structure formation, and for recoil models.Keywords
This publication has 47 references indexed in Scilit:
- Recoiling from a kick in the head-on collision of spinning black holesPhysical Review D, 2007
- Modeling Kicks from the Merger of Nonprecessing Black Hole BinariesThe Astrophysical Journal, 2007
- The Fifth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky SurveyThe Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2007
- Recoiling Black Holes in QuasarsThe Astrophysical Journal, 2007
- Maximum Gravitational RecoilPhysical Review Letters, 2007
- Alignment of the Spins of Supermassive Black Holes Prior to CoalescenceThe Astrophysical Journal, 2007
- Large Merger Recoils and Spin Flips from Generic Black Hole BinariesThe Astrophysical Journal, 2007
- Getting a Kick Out of Numerical RelativityThe Astrophysical Journal, 2006
- Gravitational Recoil of Inspiraling Black Hole Binaries to Second Post‐Newtonian OrderThe Astrophysical Journal, 2005
- Gravitational-Radiation Recoil and Runaway Black HolesThe Astrophysical Journal, 1973