If you see similar streaks in one of your photos, it’s probably time to clean the lens. But the streak in this case is in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, unaffected by the Schmutz that everyday life leaves on earth-bound hardware. I decided to figure out what the smear represents.
They are not yet sure, but the best explanation appears to be the wake left by a supermassive black hole that has liberated from the galaxy that hosted it. Likely the result of holes, these were all held together by galaxy mergers. If this is correct, it will be the first instance of this behavior we’ve seen so far.
what is that?
In the days of film cameras, it could take months or even years to develop a photograph after it was taken, but I find myself picking up a newly developed snapshot and wondering what I’ve done. It was not uncommon. Photo of. You can almost hear the reaction at the time to an astronomer’s account of seeing a smear on one of his Hubble images.
A closer look reveals that the streak extends toward a somewhat strange galaxy. “We have not encountered anything like this before in our own images or in the literature, so we decided to include this feature in our planned Keck observation plan. [telescope] Run. “
The streak (middle of both images) appears to originate from the upper right galaxy at two different wavelengths.
Van Dokkum et al.
Based on the redshift of light from the object, both the object and the galaxy are about the same distance from Earth, suggesting that the two are related. Researchers estimate the streak to be about 200,000 light years long. A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy can emit jets of matter this long (and even longer), but these jets tend to widen as they move away from the galaxy. In this case, the streak remained thin along its entire length.
Looking at the emission of stars present in streaks generally suggests that stars get younger as they move down the streak from the galaxy. Putting it all together, the streak began forming about 40 million years ago, and since then its tip appears to be gradually receding from the galaxy at about 1,600 kilometers per second.
old theory
One possible explanation for its motion is that the galaxy ejected a supermassive black hole. This is inevitable from his next two observations. Almost all galaxies appear to have a supermassive black hole at their center, and most galaxies are formed by multiple mergers. As a result, supermassive black holes from pre-merging galaxies will eventually collide. There are two ways this can lead to emissions. One is that if two of these supermassive black holes merge in places where the production of gravitational energy is uneven, it could give the post-merger product a directional kick.
If one or more galaxy mergers occurred in rapid succession (astronomically), it is possible that not all of the black holes at the galaxy’s center have yet merged. In such cases, three or more giants can loop around each other, and gravitational interactions can cause him to lose one.
