“NASA Captures Image of Black Hole Moving in Space, Creating Streak of Hot Stars”

The black hole was discovered by Peter van Dokkum of Yale University using the Hubble Space Telescope, showing that decades-old scientific instruments are still providing new insights into the universe, despite the creation of the high-resolution James Webb Space Telescope. But how can a telescope photograph something that doesn’t emit light? How do we know black holes exist?

Black holes can be seen in outer space because of their accretion disks – vortices of superheated gas and dust that emit lots of light and swirl around empty space. In this case, the black hole was also detected by light trails which were initially thought to be imaging artifacts. However, the lines were still visible when van Dokkum and his team calculated the cosmic rays that could create these artifacts.

Instead, the streaks look like a string of hot blue stars following a black hole, meaning a void of space orbits the new star as it travels at supersonic speeds away from the parent galaxy. The streak could also be an astrophysical emission – an outflow of ionized matter isn’t an uncommon sight, but the intensity of the light increases the farther a black hole is from the galactic core and lacks the characteristic scattering seen in these jets. This led the researchers to conclude that they were seeing a new row of stars.

How the newly observed black hole phenomenon works is not fully known, but it appears that the high-velocity vacuum of space collided with the gas in front of it, causing stars to form. The process appears to have started about 50 million years ago when the supermassive black holes of the two galaxies began orbiting each other. It seems then, that when the third galaxy merged, the resulting interaction caused one of the galaxy’s black holes – 20 million times the mass of our Sun – to slide in one direction while the other two galaxies went in the opposite direction.

All black hole observations will require further research, but the findings published in Astrophysics Journal Letter On April 6th pull. The discovery will be further explored by the team with follow-up observations by the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA’s flagship X-ray telescope. If the research they’ve done so far in this investigation is confirmed, it will provide astronomers with exciting new insights into the interactions between galaxies and their black holes, as well as star formation throughout the universe.