A NASA image may show the first-ever supermassive black hole leaving behind newborn stars

• a NASA Hubble image The first unruly runaway lump may appear Black hole ever discovered.

• A path denoting an object moving away from a galaxy It hints that a black hole has been expelled.

• The rogue black hole may have created a shock wave that sent a trail of new stars into the picture.

the Hubble Space Telescope still making The first discoveries of their kind After more than three decades in space. the last one? Observations of the first supermassive black hole of our galaxy have shifted.

This is what a team of astronomers proposes in a new way Stady published online. The study has been reviewed for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, according to Peter van Dokkum, the Yale astrophysicist who led the new study.

Even experts not involved in the study are excited about the team’s findings.

“All of the observations fit into this scenario,” Manuela Campanelli, an astrophysicist at Rochester Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study but did simulate black holes in her research, told Insider.

First possible image of an ‘evil’ supermassive black hole

What you see above are two pictures of the same thing that tell the story of what happened.

Look at the enlarged shot on the right: the large spot at the top right is a galaxy. Then follow the faint line running away from it, which ends with a dot in the lower left. This is where scientists believe the runaway black hole is hiding.

black holesIt is, by nature, invisible. The reason astronomers can “see” any black hole is because it is surrounded by a hot disk of gas, stars, and other visible cosmic objects.

But the most amazing part about these images is the line you see behind the black hole. This is what caught the researchers’ attention as they examined nearby stars.

They think the long tail emerging from the black hole is actually a trail of newborn stars, which formed after the black hole was ejected from its home galaxy, ripped through space, creating a shock wave that caused clouds of intergalactic gas to collapse into the stars. . .

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“I really thought I made a mistake with that weird line in the picture,” Van Dokkum told Insider. “It didn’t look like any astrophysical objects at first. Then it turned out it was real. It was in other datasets, too. That’s when I got excited.”

Although black holes are notorious for devouring and destroying stars, this star appears to have created them as well.

More notes, maybe with James Webb Space Telescopenecessary to confirm that the object in the image is really a supermassive black hole.

Why would a supermassive black hole become evil?

supermassive black holes They are mind-bogglingly dense objects with the mass of billions of suns, and scientists believe there is one in the universe center of every galaxy. Needless to say, it would take a lot of strength to drive someone out of their home.

One such catastrophic event that could do the job is if two galaxies collided together, with two galaxies The central black holes merge. Collision between black holes is one of the most violent and powerful events in the universe, and it can send the remnants of a smaller black hole into the void.

Astrophysicists have long assumed that black holes can “run away” or “run away” if they are pushed out of their galaxies by other black holes.

But no one has ever confirmed the existence of a black hole roaming in intergalactic space, much less a black hole enormous Rogue black hole.

And while a collision of two galaxies is the simplest explanation for a rogue black hole, that apparently isn’t what happened here.

2 other black holes may have expelled this one in a rare violent event

Van Dokkum believes that this black hole had a particularly rare, dramatic and violent exit. Here is his theory: two galaxies merged, and their supermassive black holes fell together, due to their immense gravity.

It happens all the time. Hubble has imaged lots of compact galaxies, like the one in the image below. The next step is what made this merger so strange.

The team believes that a third galaxy reached out to a third black hole, and its gravity caused an intricate dance of the three black holes, which ended up blasting one of them away.

Since then, over a period of 39 million years, the runaway black hole has been screaming away from its home galaxy at about 1,600 kilometers (about 1,000 miles) per second, according to calculations by Van Dokkum’s team. For reference, at that speed, it would take 25 seconds to rotate the entire Earth.

Basically, this supermassive black hole (if that’s what it is) got a third wheel and got kicked out of its house. Evidence for this third galaxy has yet to be confirmed, but the team is investigating the track they see on the other side of the galaxy, where they believe the other two black holes merged and were then ejected by the recoil.

“The picture really tells the story,” said Van Dokkum.

This makes the event exceptionally rare, Campanelli said, because it involved three black holes instead of the traditional black holes that theorists usually posit in a scenario like this.

Follow the trail of newborn stars – if you’re not a jet-setter

The other explanation for the fuzzy trail in Van Dokkum’s Hubble image is a fairly common one: Jets of material being released It is one of the centers of galaxies with very active black holes.

But both Van Dokkum and Campanelli say that’s unlikely, based on the shape of the track in the new image. Jets shooting out from the galactic centers radiate away from the galaxy, as matter shoots off a point and spreads out into the distance, as seen in the Hubble image below:

Instead, the trail of van Dokkum’s Hubble image is fading away towards galaxy. It appears to be a series of new stars that formed when a traveling black hole generated shock waves in intergalactic gas.

Campanelli added that the galaxy’s compact, irregular shape is “typical” of galaxies formed from mergers.

“If it turned out not to be real, I would be surprised,” said Van Dokkum. “If it’s not real, I think it’s actually a combination of a few other gas clouds or something that seems to line up in such a way that it looks like a line.”

Even though they are invisible, we don’t have to worry about rogue supermassive black holes sneaking up on us from other galaxies.

“We would have seen his tracks if he had been anywhere near us,” said Van Dokkum.

Read the original article at Business interested