Artist’s impression of a runaway supermassive black hole
NASA, ESA, Leah Hastak (STScI)
It seems that a space giant has escaped its home galaxy. A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows star trails leaving a galaxy some 11 billion light years away.
“There’s this strange straight line pointing to the center of this little galaxy, and I’ve never seen anything like it before,” he says. peter van dokkum At Yale University, who discovered this oddity. “It looks like something launched out of that galaxy, but right now something very huge is hurtling through space at incredible speed.”
This massive object is most likely a supermassive black hole that was once at the center of the galaxy. At the tip of the trail, van Dokkum and his colleagues found bright knots of ionized oxygen. This indicates that the black hole is slamming into the surrounding gas as it flies away at speeds of about 1600 kilometers per second. The string of stars is over 200,000 light years long, meaning the black hole left the galaxy about 40 million years ago.
The most likely cause of its escape is interaction between several different galaxies, a common process theorized decades ago to lead to rogue supermassive black holes, and ultimately When two galaxies merge, their supermassive black holes are thought to sink into the center of the new larger galaxy and orbit each other. But if a third galaxy appears, its orbit could be disrupted and one or all of the black holes thrown into intergalactic space.
A chain of young blue stars 200,000 light-years long behind a black hole
NASA, ESA, Peter Van Dokkum, Joseph DePasquale
When a black hole is blown away, it chokes up the surrounding gas and ignites star formations that lead to shimmering wakes. Researchers have applied for additional observation time with several space telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, to confirm that scenario.
Fresh star strings also tell us about how the gas surrounding invisible galaxies behaves. “You can see the trail of this star and the stars formed from the material that was around that galaxy,” says Van Dokkum. “We have this unexpected benefit from learning about these giant reservoirs of matter in which galaxies live.”
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