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Posted: **Fri Apr 07, 2023 7:46 am**

Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars
NASA | GSFC | STScI | HubbleSite | 2023 Apr 06

Artist's impression of a runaway supermassive black hole ejected from its host galaxy. Credits: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
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.

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. ...

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. ...

Hubble Photographs Stellar Trail of Runaway Black Hole
ESA Hubble | 2023 Apr 06

A Candidate Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Identified
by Shocks and Star Formation in its Wake ~ Pieter van Dokkum et al

Astrophysical Journal Letters 946(2):L50 (2023 Apr 01) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/acba86
arXiv > astro-ph > arXiv:2302.04888 > 09 Feb 2023

Posted: **Fri Apr 07, 2023 4:21 pm**

: This archival image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a curious linear feature that is so unusual it was first dismissed as an imaging artifact from Hubble’s cameras. But follow-up spectroscopic observations reveal it is a 200 000-light-year-long chain of young blue stars. A supermassive black hole lies at the tip of the bridge at lower left. The black hole was ejected from the galaxy at upper right. It compressed gas in its wake to leave a long trail of young blue stars. Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the Universe. This unusual event happened when the Universe was approximately half its current age. This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. van Dokkum (Yale University)

Note how the galaxy at top right, which looks like a white coffee bean, has ejected a runaway black hole which speeds through space and leaves a trail of young blue stars in its wake!

Amazing!!!

Ann

Starship Asterisk*

Hubble: Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars

Hubble: Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars

Re: Hubble: Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars