A Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar SDSS J092712.65+294344.0?

By S. Komossa, Hongyan Zhou, Honglin Lu. 2008

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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.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37992bbd4d442762fbac258c612a25bfd4046b95

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, background): “However, recent observations of two rapidly moving extragalactic quasars (Shields et al., 2009) are strong candidates for such recoiled black holes (Komossa et al., 2008).”
A LARGE SYSTEMATIC SEARCH FOR CLOSE SUPERMASSIVE BINARY AND RAPIDLY RECOILING BLACK HOLES (2011, unknown): “…narrow lines is associated with the recoiling BH (it could originate, for example, from biconical outflows from the accretion disk, as suggested by Komossa et al. 2008), the widths of the lines would not be a good indicator of such a system since they may display all the terends observed in…”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “…an active phase (Devecchi et al., 2009, Loeb, 2007, Merritt et al., 2009b, O’Leary and Loeb, 2009), have been searched recently, and there has been a claim of a discovery (Komossa et al., 2008), even though alternative interpretations are also viable (Bogdanović et al., 2009, Dotti et al., 2009a).”