Astronomers think they’ve detected a supermassive black hole that’s traveling away from its home galaxy at 4 million miles per hour—too fast to do what it’s notorious for: sucking in light from the universe.
The opposite may be true. Rather than tearing stars to shreds and swallowing every morsel, this black hole is thought to promote new star formation, leaving behind newborn stars that stretch 200,000 light-years across space. As the black hole turns into gas, it appears to be shooting out a narrow lane of new stars, where the gas has a chance to cool, said Peter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy at Yale University.
Exactly how it works is unknown, though, says Van Dokkum, who led research on the phenomenon captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. paper on the results(Opens in a new tab) It was posted last week in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“What we see are the consequences,” he said in a statement.(Opens in a new tab). “Like the vigil behind a ship, we see the vigil behind a black hole.”
Black holes are ordered
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Black holes are among the most elusive objects in outer space. The most common type is the stellar black hole(Opens in a new tab), often thought to be the result of the death of a massive star in a supernova explosion. The star’s matter then collapses in on itself, condensing into a relatively small area.
But how do supermassive black holes(Opens in a new tab), millions to billions of times larger than the sun, the shape is more mysterious. Many astrophysicists and cosmologists believe that these giant planets lie at the center of almost all galaxies. Recent Hubble Space Telescope observations have bolstered the theory that supermassive black holes begin in the dusty cores of starburst galaxies, where new stars are rapidly forming, but scientists are still trying to get to the bottom of them.
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“Like the vigil behind a ship, we see the vigil behind a black hole.”
Black holes do not have surfaces, as they do on a planet or a star. Instead, they have a boundary called the event horizon.(Opens in a new tab)– It’s a point of no return. Generally, if anything gets too close, it will fall in, never escaping the gravitational pull of the hole. But this strange black hole might be moving too fast to devour orbs as usual, defying the ku situation.
Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope
The research team proposed a possible theory: perhaps the runaway black hole is the result of a chain of events caused by the collision of three supermassive black holes. One could steal momentum from the other two and fly out of its host galaxy, while the other two would shoot off in the other direction. Evidence that might support this idea is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galactic core.
Van Dokkum was searching for star clusters in a nearby galaxy when he noticed what appeared to be a small line in his Hubble image. At first, he thought it was a cosmic ray that caused the image artifact. After further analysis at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii(Opens in a new tab), and he and his team predicted that it should be a train of young blue stars. The track is half as bright as its host galaxy, indicating that it is a hotbed of stellar motion.
Scientists plan to confirm the black hole explanation by following observations with the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.