BBC Focus Magazine

[Shadowwolf]

Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from gravitational wave radiation.

"It's hard to believe that a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of the sun could be moved at all, let alone kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed," said Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the new study. "But these new data support the idea that gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of space first predicted by Albert Einstein but never detected directly -- can exert an extremely powerful force."

Although the ejection of a supermassive black hole from a galaxy by recoil because more gravitational waves are being emitted in one direction than another is likely to be rare, it nevertheless could mean that there are many giant black holes roaming undetected out in the vast spaces between galaxies.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/H-12-182.html

Wonder what would occur should one of these pass near us?

[M Paul Lloyd]

Wonder what would occur should one of these pass near us?

Or indeed what effect "many" might have on the light from very distant objects??

[Shadowwolf]

To be responsible for red or blue shift would require not only many but in a rather uniform and stable distribution across the cosmos; an unlikely if not highly improbable occurrence.

[M Paul Lloyd]

True... but stranger things...

Although I accept that on a macro scale the grains of sand on a beach are considered to be randomly distributed in the context of the greater beach they are seen as far more uniform.
Thus our local space may be seen as random but the greater universe?
I'm not so sure.
Consider just how vast 15 billion light years is.
Well lets work it out.
A light year is about 6 trillion miles, and using the lesser American scale that's 6,000,000,000,000 miles multiplied by 15 billion which, taking the lesser American measure, is 15,000,000,000...................... so the universe is, and I do hope I have this right? some 900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across.


That's one big arsed beach if you ask me.