The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a "200,000 light-year-long trail of newborn stars" that may have been left behind by a runaway supermassive black hole.
Video Credit:
Black Hole Animation
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
Image of Chandra X-Ray Observatory
NASA/CXC and J. Vaughan
3 Black Hole Orbits and Slingshots
Image from paper “A candidate runaway supermassive black hole identified by shocks and star formation in its wake” by PI Pieter Von Dokkum et al.
Schematic illustration of the runaway SMBH scenario as an explanation of the key observed features. Panels 1–5 show a “classical” slingshot scenario (e.g., Saslaw et al. 1974). The background of panel 6 is a frame from an Illustris TNG simulation (Pillepich et al. 2018)
Music Credit:
“Unclaimed Space” by Peter Nickalls [PRS] via Atmosphere Music Ltd. [PRS] and Universal Production Music.
Video Credit:
Black Hole Animation
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
Image of Chandra X-Ray Observatory
NASA/CXC and J. Vaughan
3 Black Hole Orbits and Slingshots
Image from paper “A candidate runaway supermassive black hole identified by shocks and star formation in its wake” by PI Pieter Von Dokkum et al.
Schematic illustration of the runaway SMBH scenario as an explanation of the key observed features. Panels 1–5 show a “classical” slingshot scenario (e.g., Saslaw et al. 1974). The background of panel 6 is a frame from an Illustris TNG simulation (Pillepich et al. 2018)
Music Credit:
“Unclaimed Space” by Peter Nickalls [PRS] via Atmosphere Music Ltd. [PRS] and Universal Production Music.
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TechTranscript
00:00 There's an invisible giant monster on the loose!
00:03 It's barreling through intergalactic space, fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon
00:08 in 14 minutes.
00:10 But don't worry, luckily this beast is very, very far away.
00:16 This potential supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million suns, has left behind
00:22 a never-before-seen 200,000 light-year-long trail of newborn stars.
00:28 The streamer is twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.
00:32 It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive
00:37 black holes.
00:39 Astronomers suspect that first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago.
00:45 That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers.
00:49 They whirled around each other until another galaxy came along with its own supermassive
00:54 black hole.
00:55 The three of them chaotically orbited around each other.
00:58 This unstable configuration couldn't last, and eventually one of them was violently flung
01:03 out of the host galaxy.
01:06 Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, this speedy black hole is plowing into gas
01:11 in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor.
01:16 The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and
01:22 the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
01:24 Also, NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view
01:30 of the universe with Hubble's high resolution.
01:33 As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable
01:39 events elsewhere in the universe.
01:42 Hubble, once again showing us that the universe is full of fascinating phenomena.
01:47 [MUSIC]