There may be hundreds of colossal black holes – left over from the early times when the universe was coming into being and galaxy was developing – meandering in the Milky Way – says a recent study. According to the study, the black holes wandering in the Milky Way may devour anything that gets too close to them.       

The study however articulates that our Earth is safe from these knave black holes; the closest black hole to our earth, according to study, should be thousands of light-years away. The astronomers are anxious to find and locate these black holes, as they can offer significant information about the development of the Milky Way.    

"These black holes are relics of the Milky Way's past. You could say that we are archaeologists studying those relics to learn about our galaxy's history and the formation history of black holes in the early universe," says Avi Loeb, Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, the study co-author, in the study report.

According to a theory mentioned in the study, the black holes originally wandered at the centres of tiny, low-mass galaxies, and Over billions of years ago, those small galaxies merged to develop bigger galaxies like the Milky Way. And, when ever two proto-galaxies with central black holes merged, their black holes combined to form a single, "relic" black hole. On the merger of the black holes, the directional emission of gravitational radiation would cause the black hole to recoil.

The study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, states that a typical kick would send the black hole speeding outward fast enough to escape its host dwarf galaxy, but not fast enough to leave the galactic neighbourhood completely. Hence, such black holes could still be around today in the outer reaches of the Milky Way halo.

According to the study, there may be hundreds of black holes, each having a mass of 1,000 to 100,000 suns, orbiting in the fringes of the Milky Way. It would be difficult to spot these black holes, because a black hole can only be spotted when it is swallowing matter.