Yale astronomers have announced the discovery of a massive black hole hurtling through space, leaving behind a belt of newborn stars 200,000 light-years long. Pictured is a black hole drawn from observations from the Hubble Telescope. (NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak/STSCI)
An invisible monster is racing through space, leaving behind a trail of newborn stars 200,000 light-years long, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. The scientists who first spotted it say it’s a massive black hole that went on a rampage after becoming an outsider in a triangular relationship.
Instead of devouring the star in front of it like Pac-Man in the universe, this black hole running wildly plows the gas cloud in front of it in its path, casting it into a new star. In fact, the black hole is moving so fast that it doesn’t even have time for a snack, NASA said.
Scientists have never seen anything like this before, yet it was accidentally captured by the cameras of NASA’s powerful Hubble Space Telescope: With incredible force, a cloud of gas being knocked apart along the way by a black hole is New stars are constantly being formed.
“We think what we’re seeing is the wake behind the black hole, where the gas cools and can form stars,” said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University.
“What we see is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship, what we see is the wake behind the black hole,” he said. Supersonic, very high-velocity impact.”
The research paper was published April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This supermassive black hole weighs as much as 20 million suns. Scientists believe it went on a rampage after becoming an outsider in a triangle relationship.
The working theory is that the two galaxies may have merged about 50 million years ago, allowing two supermassive black holes to meet at their centers. They orbit each other as harmonious twin black holes.
Then, another galaxy appeared, with its own supermassive black hole. As the saying goes, “Two people make a company, three people don’t.” Three black holes collide, causing chaos to ensue. As a result, one of the black holes was flung out of its host galaxy at high speed. Its speed is so fast, if it is in our solar system, it is enough to fly from the earth to the moon in 14 minutes.
At the same time, when the ejected black holes are flying in one direction, the host galaxies where the other two black holes are located are ejected in the opposite direction. Next, NASA’s Webb Space Telescope (James Webb Space Telescope) and Chandra X-ray Observatory (Chandra X-ray Observatory) will continue to conduct follow-up observations to verify scientists’ speculation.
In any case, stargazers point out that all this is so far away that our planet Earth has nothing to worry about.
While this is the first galloping black hole discovered so far, it may not be the only one, NASA said.
Van Dokum said he made the new discovery “just by noticing “a small fringe” while scanning the Hubble image.”
“It didn’t look like anything we’d seen before,” he said, eventually finding that the stellar trail was “pretty amazing, very, very bright, very unusual.”
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due to launch by 2030, should give astronomers a wider view of the universe and spot more “runaway” black holes that are forming stars on the runaway. #
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