You might think you have troublesome neighbours, but spare a thought for one galaxy where the disruption nearby was so catastrophic it caused its black hole to break free.
Supermassive black holes are believed to sit at the centre of every galaxy, and remain anchored there unless something mega happens in the vicinity.
Now a newly discovered black hole seems to be wandering through it’s own galaxy, destroying everything in it’s path, after a neighbouring galaxy collided with it.
And with a mass around 100,000 times that of our sun, that is really doing some damage.
This is something that could potentially happen to our (currently well behaved) black hole in the Milky Way. But don’t panic, we’ve got approximately 5 billion years or so before all hell breaks loose.
Scientists at the University of Hampshire, first noticed the rogue black hole when it was still secure, but since then it has broken free and is casually roaming around the galaxy SDSS J141711.07+522540.8.
It won’t be coming our way any time soon though, unless we learn how to travel 4.5 billion light-years from earth in the next couple of years.
NASA says that black holes form when the centre of a massive star collapses in on itself, after running out of fuel, scientists think that supermassive black holes are formed at the same time as the galaxy they are in.
One hypothesis is that black holes form before the galaxy and then their force pulls an entire of galaxy of stuff around it.