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<\/p>\nThroughout the universe, supermassive black holes can typically be found at the center of massive galaxies that stretch tens of light years across. However, using Hubble, a team of researchers has discovered a supermassive black hole that appears to have been ejected from its galaxy. The black hole, which is around 20 million times more massive than our Sun, is traveling incredibly fast \u2014 so fast that it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 14 minutes.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, as the black hole travels through space it is plowing into gas ahead of it. As the black hole compresses the gas, star formation is triggered, and new hot blue stars are created \u2014 leaving a 200,000 light-year-long trail of stars behind the black hole. The trail of stars is very bright as it likely houses an extremely high amount of young stars, with the trail\u2019s brightness being nearly half as bright as the black hole\u2019s host galaxy. Nothing like this has ever been observed by scientists, and Hubble\u2019s observations are helping scientists understand the characteristics of black holes and how they affect their surrounding environments.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In Hubble\u2019s observations, the trail of stars appears to be a bright, thin singular string of light extending from a galaxy. The black hole is barrelling through space at one end of the column, where an extremely bright spot of ionized oxygen also lies; the team of researchers believes this bright spot of gas is created by the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, rapidly shocking and heating the gas to extreme temperatures. The spot of gas could also be radiation produced by an accretion disk surrounding the black hole.<\/p>\n
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Hubble\u2019s image of the runaway black hole and the 200,000 light-year-long trail of stars. (Credit: NASA\/ESA\/Pieter van Dokkum (Yale)\/Joseph DePasquale (STScI))<\/p>\n
\u201cWe think we\u2019re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we\u2019re looking at star formation trailing the black hole,\u201d explained Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.<\/p>\n
\u201cGas 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,\u201d said van Dokkum.<\/p>\n
As mentioned, this phenomenon has never been observed before by scientists, van Dokkum et al. just happened to stumble across the trail of stars while searching for globular clusters within a dwarf galaxy near the trail of stars when they noticed the trail in one of the Hubble images.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it. I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, \u2018Oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.\u2019 When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn\u2019t look like anything we\u2019ve seen before,\u201d van Dokkum said.<\/p>\n
Rocket building kits (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});<\/p>\n When van Dokkum et al. noticed the trail in their images, they chose to perform follow-up spectroscopic observations using the ground-based W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Through these new observations, the team determined that the trail was likely the result of a supermassive black hole being ejected through the outer gas halo of its host galaxy.<\/p>\n However, how does an object as massive and intense as a supermassive black hole get ejected from its host galaxy?<\/p>\n The ejected black hole\u2019s host galaxy is the result of a collision between two galaxies approximately 50 million years ago. Given that the two galaxies had supermassive black holes at their centers, the two black holes began orbiting around one another, becoming a binary black hole system.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n