Nasa : A Massive Black Hole Is Leaving A Trail of Stars

Researchers have discovered a phenomenon never observed before: a trail of newborn stars twice as long as the Milky Way left behind by a supermassive black hole moving through space.

In a research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have documented the discovery made accidentally by the Hubble Space Telescope and announced on April 6.

According to the researchers, the trail of newborn stars is approximately 200,000 light years long. The black hole, which weighs as much as 20 million suns, is moving so rapidly that it could travel from the Earth to the moon in just 14 minutes.

Pieter van Dokkum from Yale University said in a news release that the discovery was purely serendipitous.

Van Dokkum noticed a small streak while searching for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy.

"At first, I assumed it was a linear artifact caused by a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector," said van Dokkum. "However, after ruling out cosmic rays as a possibility, we realized that the streak was still present. It was unlike anything we had ever seen before.

According to the researchers, the black hole may be moving at such a high speed that it is heating up the gas in front of it, leading to the creation of new stars.

Another possibility suggested by the researchers is that the trail of newborn stars could be a result of radiation emitted by an accretion disk around the black hole. An accretion disk is a hot gas disk that orbits a black hole and acts as its primary source of light.

Van Dokkum explained that they believe the trail of newborn stars is a wake left behind by the black hole, where the gas cools and is able to form stars. Therefore, what they are observing is a phenomenon of star formation trailing the black hole.

The researchers hypothesize that the supermassive black hole's high velocity may have been the result of a collision between three supermassive black holes. They suggest that two galaxies merged about 50 million years ago, bringing two supermassive black holes to their centers, which then began orbiting each other.

The researchers suggest that a third black hole, belonging to another galaxy, entered the orbit of the existing two. This caused one of the black holes to be ejected, resulting in the high speed of the remaining black hole observed today. To confirm this theory, follow-up observations will be carried out using the James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory.