NASA's Hubble finds black hole with weight of 20-million Suns
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a supermassive black hole and researchers say nothing like it has ever been seen before in the universe. The black hole is shooting through space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in just 14 minutes. The cosmic object weighs about 20 million Suns.
Why does this story matter?
Black holes are considered to be among the most bizarre space objects. The gravitational force in black holes is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. Their mysterious nature is one of the reasons why they have spiked interest among astronomers. Scientists believe that supermassive black holes lie at the center of almost all large galaxies, including the Milky Way.
Black hole has left behind a contrail of newborn stars
The supermassive black hole has left behind a never-before-seen contrail of newborn stars, which extend 200,000 light-years, that is about twice the diameter of the Milky Way. Researchers think the contrail could be because of a "game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes." "The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack," said NASA in a statement.
The black hole is seen extending to its host galaxy
The black hole lies at one end of a column in space and extends back to its parent galaxy. At the outermost end of the column, there's a bright cloud of ionized oxygen. Researchers think this is because gas is being shocked and heated when the black hole hits it or it could be the radiation from an accretion disk surrounding the black hole.
Astronomers accidentally discovered the supermassive black hole
Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University was actually looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy when he accidentally spotted the black hole. "I immediately thought, Oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact," said van Dokkum. "When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."
Dokkum describes the star trail as "quite astonishing"
Dokkum describes the contrail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright, and very unusual." The team performed follow-up investigations with W. M. Keck Observatories, Hawaii. They concluded it was the "aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy."
The contrail could result from collisions between supermassive black holes
The team theorizes that the skyrocket contrail could be due to multiple collisions between supermassive black holes, leading to a "chaotic and unstable configuration." "One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy," said NASA. Researchers hope to perform further investigations using James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
