It’s likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long “contrail” of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. There’s an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI) Hubble Space Telescope Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars This illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope observations of a 200,000-light-year-long “contrail” of stars behind an escaping black hole. This precipitates the birth of hot blue stars. As the black hole plows through intergalactic space it compresses tenuous gas in front to it. This is an artist’s impression of a runaway supermassive black hole that was ejected from its host galaxy as a result of a tussle between it and two other black holes. Nothing like it has ever been seen anywhere else in the universe before. The black hole must be compressing gas along its wake, which condenses to form stars. For Hubble’s electronic cameras, cosmic rays skimming along the detector look like “scratches.” But once spectroscopy was done on the oddball streak van Dokkum realized it was really a 200,000- light-year-long chain of young blue stars located over halfway across the universe! van Dokkum and his colleagues believe that it stretches between a runaway monster back hole and the galaxy it was ejected from. That’s what happened to Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images and noticed a suspected blemish that looked like a scratch on photographic film. The universe is so capricious that even the slightest things that might go unnoticed could have profound implications. A Bizarre 200,000-Light-Year-Long Bridge Links a Galaxy to Its Escaping Black Hole The event, described as a game of galactic billiards, is likely the outcome of multiple collisions among supermassive black holes, leaving astronomers eager to investigate further with the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Captured accidentally by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, this extraordinary contrail of star formation is the result of the black hole barreling through intergalactic space and triggering new star formation as it impacts gas ahead of it. A rare and bizarre cosmic event involving three massive black holes has led to the discovery of an unprecedented phenomenon: a supermassive black hole moving at incredible speeds, leaving a 200,000-light-year-long trail of newborn stars in its wake.
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