The other possibility is considered by astronomers to be much rarer and more novel: The supermassive black hole may be part of a pair with another black hole that’s invisible to their measurements. Cosmic Record Holders: The 12 Biggest Objects in the Universe
The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics "The result of such a merger can cause the newborn black hole to recoil, and we may be watching it in the act of recoiling or as it settles down again." "We may be observing the aftermath of two supermassive black holes merging," Jim Condon, a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said in a statement. The researchers don't know what could have made such a heavy object move at such a high speed, but they came up with two possibilities. Scientists previously clocked a supermassive black hole hurtling through space at 5 million mph (7.2 million km/h), they reported in 2017 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Though 110,000 mph (177,000 km/h) is pretty fast, it’s not the fastest supermassive black hole. Of the 10 black holes they measured, nine were at rest, and one was on the move.
One of the telescopes the researchers used for the experiment was the Arecibo Observatory, which has since been decommissioned after the instrument platform crashed into the telescope's disk in December 2020. In that way, the scientists could precisely measure the velocity of the black holes it had originated from. They took more observations from various telescopes and combined them all together using a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) with this technique, the researchers could combine the images from several telescopes to effectively act like an image captured by a very big telescope, about the size of the distance between them. By taking advantage of a cosmic phenomenon known as red-shift, in which objects moving away have their light stretched to longer (and therefore redder) wavelengths, the astronomers were able to observe the extent to which the maser light from the accretion disk was shifted away from its known frequency when stationary, and thereby gauge the speed of the moving black hole.
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