How frustrated strings would pull the black holes from the centers of galaxies - art. no. 045008

Recently Pen and Spergel have shown that a universe whose energy density is dominated by a frustrated network of non-Abelian TeV-scale cosmic strings could account for a broad class of cosmological observations. In this paper we consider the effects of such a string network on the massive black hole s widely believed to inhabit the centers of many galaxies. As these black h oles traverse the universe together with their host galaxies, they would in tersect a large number of string segments. We argue that such segments woul d become stuck to the black hole, and be stretched by the hole's motion. St retching the strings would cause significant deceleration of the black hole s. Although the black holes would probably not be removed from the galaxies completely, they would be noticeably displaced from the galactic center of mass-by at least 5 kpc. This displacement seems to be in contradiction wit h the observational evidence.