A black hole accidentally captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been seen hurtling through intergalactic space so fast that it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes within our solar system.
The supermassive black hole, weighing up to 20 million suns, has left behind a 2,00,000 light year long condensed trail of newborn stars, twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy, according to National Aeronautics. and Space Administration (NASA), USA.
Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven says ”We think we see a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So we’re looking at star formation behind the black hole, we are seeing are the consequences. Like the wake behind the ship, we see the wake behind the black hole”.
Supermassive black hole
They said that the black hole lies at one end of the column, at the other end of which lies its parent galaxy. They think the gas is “shocked” and heated by the motion of the black hole slamming into the gas, or it could be radiation from the accretion disk around the black hole.
Van Dokkum says ”I was just looking at the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a small streak. I immediately thought, ‘Oh, a cosmic ray hit the camera detector and caused a linear imaging artifact.’ When we removed the cosmic rays, we realized it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’d seen before”.
Van Dokkum and his team followed the view using spectroscopy with the W.M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. The star trail is ”quite stunning, very, very bright and very unusual,” leading them to conclude that they are looking at the aftermath of a black hole that flew through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.
Astronomers believe that this phenomenon is likely the result of multiple supermassive black hole collisions, the first two of which probably merged 50 million years ago. When they came closer at their centers, they swirled around each other like a binary black hole.
Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole, mixing the three to create a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed the other two black holes of momentum and was ejected from the host galaxy.
Then the remaining black hole binary shot off in the opposite direction, they said. On the far side of the host galaxy, a feature that could be a runaway binary black hole can be seen. Indirect evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the core of the galaxy.
The next step, they said, would be to make follow-up observations with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.
Written by: Vaishali Verma
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