The “runaway” black hole leaves the galaxy and sows stars along the way; To look

Although black holes do show some paradoxical features, one captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s electronic cameras, exhibited somewhat peculiar behavior unlike anything ever seen in astronomy: ejected from its host galaxy, sped through space, and left a light trail nearly twice the size of our Milky Way.

As in a gigantic game of cosmic pool, this massive astronomical object may have been ejected by the arrival of a third black hole into a binary black hole system that resulted from the merger of two galaxies about 50 million years ago. Complex gravitational interactions worked like a violent “knock”.

Launched from the galaxy at an astonishing 1,600 kilometers per second – a speed that would allow a 14-minute journey from Earth to the Moon – the fugitive space monster began interacting with its galaxy surroundings and instead of swallowing stars as it normally does, it collided to create them. Compressing intergalactic gas clustering into new stars.

How did scientists discover the runaway black hole?

Interestingly, this space catastrophe, which left a 200,000 light-year-long trace of blue light from a chain of young blue stars, discovered purely by chance By Pieter van Dokkum, Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University in the USA. At first, the astronomer thought it was a “scratch” on the Hubble camera caused by a cosmic ray.

After eliminating cosmic rays, Van Dokkum performed a follow-up spectroscopy at the WM Keck Observatories in Hawaii. The result was a star trail “Pretty amazing, very, very bright and very unusual”. The result is published Astrophysical Journal Letterswas that it was a black hole flying through a halo of gas and out of its host galaxy.