A Nearly Naked Supermassive Black Hole

Abstract

During a systematic search for supermassive black holes (SMBHs) not in galactic nuclei, we identified the compact symmetric radio source B3 1715+425 with an emission-line galaxy offset ~ 8.5 kpc from the nucleus of the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) in the redshift $z=0.1754$ cluster ZwCl 8193. B3 1715+425 is too bright (brightness temperature $\sim 3\times 10^{10}$ K at observing frequency 7.6 GHz) and too luminous (1.4 GHz luminosity $\sim 10^{25}$ W/Hz) to be powered by anything but a SMBH, but its host galaxy is much smaller ($\sim 0.9$ kpc $\times$ 0.6 kpc full width between half-maximum points) and optically fainter (R-band absolute magnitude $\sim -18.2$) than any other radio galaxy. Its high radial velocity $\sim 1860$ km/s relative to the BCG, continuous ionized wake extending back to the BCG nucleus, and surrounding debris indicate that the radio galaxy was tidally shredded passing through the BCG core, leaving a nearly naked supermassive black hole fleeing from the BCG with space velocity $>2000$ km/s. The radio galaxy has mass $<6\times 10^9$ solar masses and infrared luminosity $\sim 3\times 10^{11}$ solar luminosities close to its dust Eddington limit, so it is vulnerable to further mass loss from radiative feedback.

8 pages, 12 figures. Revised version, accepted for publication in ApJ