NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a possible runaway black hole streaking through intergalactic space, leaving behind a 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.
The black hole is moving so fast that it's leaving behind a never-before-seen chain of young blue stars stretching halfway across the universe.
The column is believed to be linked to the black hole ejected from its parent galaxy after being involved in a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.
Fast-moving Black Hole
According to Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University, the black hole is not gobbling up stars ahead of it, as is often the case. It plows into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor.
The black hole is moving so fast that it is streaking past gas rather than slowing down and taking time for a snack. The trail left behind the black hole is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to and must have lots of new stars.
Nothing like this has ever been observed in the universe, where the black hole compresses gas along its trail before it condenses to produce stars.
van Dokkum found the streak while searching for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. His initial assumption was that the linear imaging artifact resulted from a cosmic ray striking the camera detector.
After removing cosmic rays, they discovered that it was still present and that they did not resemble anything they had previously seen. The team used the W for further spectroscopy.
This led them to conclude that they were viewing the debris left behind by a black hole that had passed through the gas halo surrounding the host galaxy.
Intergalactic Explosion
Supermassive black holes are likely to have collided several times to cause this intergalactic explosion. The first two galaxies are thought to have combined around 50 million years ago, creating two supermassive black holes at their centers.
They rotated like a binary black hole around one another. Then another galaxy with its supermassive black hole appeared, and the three of them messed everything up, creating an unstable and chaotic structure.
According to NASA, one of the black holes was ejected from the host galaxy after stealing momentum from the other two black holes.
The binary black holes launched in the opposite direction from the single black hole's initial trajectory. The runaway binary black hole may be the object visible on the other side of the host galaxy.
The lack of indication that an active black hole is still present at the galaxy's center serves as circumstantial evidence.
The next step is to conduct additional measurements with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope to verify the black hole explanation.
Researchers hope that NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will offer a wide-angle view of the cosmos like Hubble, will provide further insight into the intergalactic runaway black hole.
The possibility of a runaway black hole has revealed how unpredictable the universe is and how even seemingly insignificant events can have far-reaching effects.
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