Black holes are thought of by many as voracious cosmic pits that swallow anything that comes close to them. According to NASA, one of these is hurtling through intergalactic space at incredible speed. But instead of absorbing the stars, it creates them behind it.
Astronomers made an unusual discovery on archival images from the Hubble telescope. In the endless space between the galaxies, they came across traces of a black hole that is hurtling unstoppably through space. Its speed is especially striking. According to astronomers’ calculations, the black hole travels so fast that it would cover the distance of approximately 380,000 kilometers between the Earth and the Moon in 14 minutes, the portal writes Daily Mail.
Its monstrous size is also unusual. It is said to have the same mass as 20 million of our Suns. And even then, they can’t say where exactly it is, because it is completely invisible in the images from the telescope. “Just the fact that we found it is a pure miracle,” the astronomer said Pieter van Dokkum from Yale University.
But while most ideas about black holes include huge bodies with unimaginably strong gravity capable of devouring everything nearby, the reality in this case is different. Instead of devouring stars, the black hole, which has yet to be named, creates stars.
This is how astronomers explain the gigantic band of stars that a black hole leaves behind. This belt is more than 200,000 light-years across, which is twice the diameter of the Milky Way. It thus created tens of thousands of stars along its journey.
The reason for the formation of new stars is the high speed of the black hole. It attracts the surrounding gases and bodies with its gravity, but it is not enough to absorb them before they fly away too far. “We think we see a path behind the black hole where the gases cool and are able to form stars,” van Dokkum believes.
Hubble image showing the path of the black hole | Source: NASA
Astronomers have also come up with a theory of how an extremely fast black hole could have formed. They compare it to a cosmic pool table made up of three black holes. In the beginning, there was supposed to be one double black hole that met a third one. This third hole, which is the star maker, was supposed to collide with the original double. They then launched her from her home galaxy on a journey through space. NASA is now waiting for images from the more modern James Webb telescope to confirm its assumptions and try to find the other two black holes that are supposed to be pointing the other way.
Signals from space excited scientists. It may be a habitable planet:
TN.cz
