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TTA, as you mentioned earlier..."I would not jump to any conclusions yet. They may never find these 'black holes', and it may all fade away. Yet, there still is that chance.
We will be watching and looking."
Perhaps you should be "Looking" at the latest information pertaining to the Wayward Black Hole spotted Staggering Through a nearby Galaxy, and passing Nearby to ours!
here's the report, and a link pertaining...
"Wayward Black Hole Staggers Through Galaxy, Passes Nearby"
(By: Robert Roy Britt, Senior Science Writer)
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/blackhole_010913.html
Conducting a bit of astronomical archaeology, researchers have dug up 43-year-old photographic evidence of an ancient black hole and used the information to learn that the object has been wandering at high speed on an odd, looping path through the Milky Way Galaxy for 7 billion years.
The study, discussed in the Sept. 13 issue of the journal Nature, represents the first measure of a black hole's movement through space, said researchers involved in the work.
The object's travels take it above and below the main plane of the galaxy, where the Sun and most other stars reside and orbit around the galactic center in relatively orderly fashion. The wayward black hole zooms along at 90 miles per second (145 kilometers per second) relative to the Earth, currently carving an arc up and over our solar system.
In pinning down the vagabond's trajectory and piecing together a picture of its past, researchers say they are adding pages to at least one chapter in the book that explains how the galaxy formed.
The object is estimated to have been around more than 2 billion years before our Sun was born, a time when the Milky Way was a toddler of a galaxy.
"We believe that hundreds of thousands of very massive stars formed early in the history of our Galaxy, but this is the first black hole remnant of one of those huge primeval stars that we've found," said lead researcher Felix Mirabel, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Astronomy and Space Physics of Argentina and the French Atomic Energy Commission.
**** "Retracing the route" ****
In a telephone interview, Mirabel explained that long ago a massive star exploded, its remaining mass imploding and forming the black hole he and his colleagues studied.
In the intervening eons, the black hole, which has a travelling companion star to feed off of, has taken an ever-changing course through the galaxy. The path has now brought the object relatively near to our Sun. At just 6,000 light-years away, it is close enough to study.
Though this black hole and all its brethren can't actually be seen, researchers examine radiation generated by violent interactions near such objects, a surrounding sphere called the "event horizon" beyond which all things, including light, become irrevocably trapped.
Mirabel said the wandering black hole just discovered is at a safe distance, and its orbit won't affect our solar system.
The probability of any similar objects ever interacting with the solar system is very remote, he said, even though he expects there are hundreds of thousands of them winging through the galaxy at odd angles.
**** "Four decades of data" ****
Determining the black hole's orbit was the first step in figuring out where it came from and how old it is.
The object, officially called XTE J1118+480, was discovered by the Rossi X-ray satellite on March 29, 2000. Mirabel and his colleagues used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array of radio telescopes to observe it in May and July of 2000.
But the key evidence was dug up from optical images taken 43 years apart for the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. The researchers used the object's movement during those years to calculate the orbit.
Each 230 million years, the black hole and its companion complete one trip through the galaxy, the new research shows. But because the Milky Way's mass is distributed so widely -- some in the center, some in the galactic plane, and some in a vast "halo" that surrounds the entire galaxy -- the trajectory changes slightly with each orbit, Mirabel explained.
**** "Booted out" ****
The orbit indicates that some 7 billion years ago the black hole was ejected from what astronomers call a globular cluster. These dense groupings of stars -- hundreds of thousands in each cluster -- represent some of the oldest stars in the galaxy and are frequently found in the galaxy's halo, which is otherwise sparsely populated.
Some researchers speculate that globular clusters formed shortly after the Big Bang and might help explain the formation of the universe as a whole.
"The star that preceded this black hole probably formed in a globular cluster even before our galaxy's disk was formed," Mirabel said. "What we're doing here is the astronomical equivalent of archaeology, seeing traces of the intense burst of star formation that took place during an early stage of our galaxy's development."
The newly studied black hole's wild ride likely resulted from an ejection caused by the gravitational interaction with other massive objects in the globular cluster.
Mirabel and colleague Vivek Dhawan, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in New Mexico, say there are two other possible explanations for the black hole's strange orbit: It might have formed in the galactic plane and been gravitationally booted out; or it could have been introduced into the Milky Way when another, smaller galaxy was absorbed in a merger.
"We think it's more likely that it was gravitationally ejected from the globular cluster," Dhawan said.
**** "Packing for a picnic" ****
For snacking purposes, the travelling black hole has taken along a companion star, an object that was once large but after billions of years has been reduced to roughly one-third the size of our Sun, partially eaten and with its innards exposed.
The researchers think the black hole gravitationally enlisted its travelling buddy just prior to being ejected from the globular cluster. Ever since, it has been siphoning matter from the star as the two objects orbit each other.
Theory holds that the matter disappears forever into the intense gravitational grip of the black hole.
This particular arrangement of a star and a black hole is referred to by astronomers as a microquasar because of the violent interaction at the surface of the black hole, where strong jets of radio waves and other emissions are shot out into space.
Some microquasars emit incredibly violent winds of energy when material from the companion star smacks into the black hole. Others stream energy into space in the form of jets that race out in two opposite directions.
**** "Larger cousins" ****
Microquasars, though relatively small, have been likened to full-blown quasars, huge objects only found in the distant universe and therefore very far back in time.
Quasars, or quasi-stellar radio sources, are far more massive and energetic. They are powered by supermassive black holes that snatch all nearby matter into a colossal well of no return that can hide a mass equal to billions of stars.
In yet another black-hole configuration, a similar but less active black hole with a mass of about 2.6 million Suns is thought to sit at the center of our galaxy. Astronomers recently provided some of the best evidence to date that this object exists.
Microquasars, on the other hand, are anchored by black holes that are typically called "stellar" black holes, with a mass equal to only a handful of stars.
About a dozen microquasars have been found, mostly in the plane of the Milky Way. Some, instead of involving a black hole, are powered by a neutron star. These objects were formed from stars not quite large enough to evolve into black holes, yet they are still said to be 10 trillion times denser than steel.
Also participating in the new study were Roberto Mignani of the European Southern Observatory, Irapuan Rodrigues of the Brazilian National Research Council at the French Atomic Energy Commission, and Fabrizia Guglielmetti of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
