black holes between galaxies?

[claymore]

Can there be black holes in the space between galaxies,or would they be impossible to see as there would be no matter being drawn into them?

[jkeeley]

Black holes are created when stars die. As there are only stars in galaxies, there can't be any black holes in between galaxies.

[jake-the-peg]

You're right Claymore.

There are more than one type of black holes.

Pretty much every galaxy is believed to contain a supermassive black hole at it's core. That is one that could be tens of billions of times more massive than the sun.

Our understanding of how these form is not clear and it could be that there exist supermassive blackholes between galaxies that have no surrounding galactic stars perhaps because there were not many and they have fallen into the black hole or because they formed somehow without them.

However if they do exist I think they would be rare because we'd expect to see their gravitational effect on nearby galaxies.

This has been an area of much study in recent years because the way galaxies rotate has given us a lot of information about dark matter (which we only see by it's gravity).

This dark matter seems to spread out far past the edge of galaxies.

One of the candidates for dark matter are primordial black holes. These are tiny black holes that might have been formed during the big bang and would indeed spread out past the visible galactic edges.

However no evidence has been found for these and they're a bit of an outside bet.

So I guess the short answer is yes there could be but they're probably rare

[Robb Phoenix]

Perhaps we could have primordial black holes (black holes formed during the period of the big bang and not due to the collapse of stars). These black holes are quite small and have masses lesser than the sun.They are mostly found outside galaxies and any at present most of them will have nearly evaporated.