A supermassive black hole ejected from its galaxy, likely as a result of a collision with competing black holes, is moving, leaving a 200,000 light-year long glowing tail of young stars in its wake.
This incredible phenomenon, which scientists have never seen before, was discovered by the Hubble telescope by accident. The supermassive black hole, which has a mass equivalent to 20 million suns, is moving so fast that it would cover the distance between the Earth and the Moon in just 14 minutes – that’s about 457 kilometers per second.
As the black hole travels, it collects gas in front of it. As a result, new stars form in the thick regions of gas left behind this runaway black hole. Usually a supermassive black hole passing through clouds of gas feeds on it. But this space monster is moving too fast to engulf the clusters.
Thus, the runaway black hole is actively creating a corridor of young stars forming a tail that points to the supermassive black hole’s source galaxy, the researchers say. This tail is twice as bright as the galaxy itself, indicating that it is full of stars.
The team believes the black hole may have been ejected from multiple supermassive black hole collisions that occurred when two galaxies merged 50 million years ago, bringing the two cosmic titans closer.
As the supermassive black holes swirled around each other, another galaxy joined them, carrying with it another supermassive black hole. The interaction of the three black holes was chaotic and led to the fact that one of them went on an intergalactic journey. This means that a newly arrived black hole could have entered the system and eventually replaced one of the original black holes, like a space cuckoo.
As the runaway black hole moved away from its former companions, the new pair moved in the opposite direction.
The next step in the study will be to search for evidence of these binary black holes using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
