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Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars
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. 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. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.
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Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to.
The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.
"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."
Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.
This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.
Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion.
When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy's core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.
NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view of the universe with Hubble's exquisite resolution. As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable "star streaks" elsewhere in the universe. This may require machine learning using algorithms that are very good at finding specific weird shapes in a sea of other astronomical data, according to van Dokkum.
Video: https://youtu.be/aPAP2ewFR0A
RELATED TOPICS Space & Time Black Holes Galaxies Astronomy Astrophysics Stars NASA Space Telescopes Space Exploration
RELATED TERMS Milky Way Galaxy Spitzer space telescope Light-year Globular cluster Black hole Titan (moon) Jupiter
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Story Source:
Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Related Multimedia :
Artist's impression of a runaway supermassive black hole and video about a possible runaway black hole
Journal Reference :
Pieter van Dokkum, Imad Pasha, Maria Luisa Buzzo, Stephanie LaMassa, Zili Shen, Michael A. Keim, Roberto Abraham, Charlie Conroy, Shany Danieli, Kaustav Mitra, Daisuke Nagai, Priyamvada Natarajan, Aaron J. Romanowsky, Grant Tremblay, C. Megan Urry, Frank C. van den Bosch. A Candidate Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Identified by Shocks and Star Formation in its Wake . The Astrophysical Journal Letters , 2023; 946 (2): L50 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/acba86
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Follow: Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Subscribe: RSS Feeds. advertisement. 2. Hubble sees possible runaway black hole creating a trail of stars. Facebook. Twitter. Pinterest. LinkedIN. Email. 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. 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. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes. advertisement. Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to. The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum. "This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before." Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy. This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion. When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy's core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation. NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view of the universe with Hubble's exquisite resolution. As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable "star streaks" elsewhere in the universe. This may require machine learning using algorithms that are very good at finding specific weird shapes in a sea of other astronomical data, according to van Dokkum. Video: https://youtu.be/aPAP2ewFR0A. RELATED TOPICS Space & Time Black Holes Galaxies Astronomy Astrophysics Stars NASA Space Telescopes Space Exploration. RELATED TERMS Milky Way Galaxy Spitzer space telescope Light-year Globular cluster Black hole Titan (moon) Jupiter. advertisement. Story Source: Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center . Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Related Multimedia : Artist's impression of a runaway supermassive black hole and video about a possible runaway black hole. Journal Reference : Pieter van Dokkum, Imad Pasha, Maria Luisa Buzzo, Stephanie LaMassa, Zili Shen, Michael A. Keim, Roberto Abraham, Charlie Conroy, Shany Danieli, Kaustav Mitra, Daisuke Nagai, Priyamvada Natarajan, Aaron J. Romanowsky, Grant Tremblay, C. Megan Urry, Frank C. van den Bosch. A Candidate Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Identified by Shocks and Star Formation in its Wake . The Astrophysical Journal Letters , 2023; 946 (2): L50 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/acba86. Cite This Page : MLA. APA. Chicago. Print. Email. Share. 2. 3. 4. 5. Breaking. StowÂaways in the Genome. Male Yellow Crazy Ants Are Real-Life Chimeras. Einstein's Theory of Gravity: New Findings. Gusty Winds in a Far-Off Neutron Star System. Shutting Down Nuclear Power: Air Pollution. Elephant's Self-Taught Banana Peeling. Warmth-Trapping Secrets of Polar Bear Fur. Before Life: How Were Amino Acids Formed? High BP in Your 30s, Worse Brain Health Later. Brain Tumors Treatment and Diet. SPACE & TIME. A Star Is Born: Study Reveals Complex Chemistry Inside 'Stellar Nurseries' MATTER & ENERGY. An Illuminated Water Droplet Creates an 'Optical Atom' Entangled Atoms Cross Quantum Network from One Lab to Another. COMPUTERS & MATH. Video Game Playing Causes No Harm to Young Children's Cognitive Abilities, Study Finds. AI Technology Generates Original Proteins from Scratch. advertisement. SPACE & TIME. Humans Need Earth-Like Ecosystem for Deep-Space Living. Lightning Strike Creates Phosphorus Material. New Findings That Map the Universe's Cosmic Growth Support Einstein's Theory of Gravity. MATTER & ENERGY. Wonder Material Graphene Claims Yet Another Superlative. Table Tennis Brain Teaser: Playing Against Robots Makes Our Brains Work Harder. New Textile Unravels Warmth-Trapping Secrets of Polar Bear Fur. COMPUTERS & MATH. Technology Advance Paves Way to More Realistic 3D Holograms for Virtual Reality and More. Origami-Inspired Robots Can Sense, Analyze and Act in Challenging Environments. Robotic Hand Can Identify Objects With Just One Grasp. Astrophysicists Hunt for Second-Closest Supermassive Black Hole. Nov. 28, 2022 — Milky Way's Graveyard of Dead Stars Found. Sep. 29, 2022 — Astronomers Find Hidden Trove of Massive Black Holes. May 24, 2022 — Black Hole Key to Galaxies' Behemoths. Mar. 29, 2021 — advertisement. Toggle navigation. Menu. S D. S D Home Page Top Science News Latest News. Home Home Page Top Science News Latest News. Health View all the latest top news in the health sciences, or browse the topics below: Health & Medicine Allergy Alternative Medicine Cancer Cold and Flu Diabetes Diseases Heart Disease Infectious Diseases Obesity Stem Cells ... more topics Mind & Brain ADD and ADHD Addiction Alzheimer's Autism Depression Headaches Intelligence Psychology Relationships Schizophrenia ... more topics Living Well Parenting Child Development Stress Skin Care Men's Health Women's Health Nutrition Diet and Weight Loss Fitness Healthy Aging ... more topics. 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