‘Runaway’ black hole is spotted tearing through the universe – as NASA warns there’s an ‘invisible monster on the loose’
- A supermassive black hole is barrelling through the universe, NASA says
- Weighing as much as 20million suns, it has left a trail of stars in its wake
NASA has warned that there’s an ‘invisible monster on the loose’, in the form of a ‘runaway’ black hole.
The supermassive black hole is barrelling through the universe so quickly that if it were in our solar system, it could travel the 237,674-mile journey from Earth to the Moon in just 14 minutes.
Weighing as much as 20million suns, it has left a trail of stars in its wake, measuring 200,000-light-years – twice the diameter of the Milky Way. Scientists outlined the findings for the possible black hole in a study led by Yale University.
‘We think we’re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars,’ said study lead author Professor Pieter van Dokkum.
‘So, we’re looking at star formation trailing the black hole.’
NASA has warned that there’s an ‘invisible monster on the loose’, in the form of a ‘runaway’ black hole (artist’s impression)
How did the black hole ‘run away’?
The researchers believe the runaway black hole escaped after two galaxies merged around 50 million years ago, bringing together the supermassive black holes at their centres.
Then, when a third galaxy came along with its own black hole, the three mixed, leading to a ‘chaotic and unstable configuration’.
One of the black holes likely stole momentum from the other two and got thrown out of its host galaxy.
As the runaway black hole took off in one direction, the two remaining black holes shot of in the other direction, according to the researchers.
While you might imagine a black hole gobbling up stars ahead of it, analysis with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found that this isn’t the case.
Instead, the black hole, which is 7.5 billion light-years from Earth, is ploughing into gas in front of it, triggering star formation.
‘What we’re seeing is the aftermath,’ Professor van Dokkum said. ‘Like the wake behind a ship we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole.’
Hubble’s images show that the black hole lies at one end of a column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy.
The outermost tip of this column contains a ‘remarkably bright knot of ionised oxygen’, which the researcher suggest is probably the result of heat from the motion of the black hole.
‘Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas,’ Professor van Dokkum added.
‘How it works exactly is not really known.’
The scientist stumbled across the black hole while scanning images on Nasa’s Hubble telescope for globular star clusters in a nearby galaxy.
‘I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak,’ he explained.
‘I immediately thought, “oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact”.
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
‘When we eliminated cosmic rays we realised it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before.’
Researchers believe the runaway black hole escaped after two galaxies merged around 50million years ago, bringing together the supermassive black holes at their centres.
Then, when a third galaxy came along with its own black hole, the three mixed, leading to a ‘chaotic and unstable configuration’.
One of the black holes likely stole momentum from the other two and got thrown out of its host galaxy.
As the runaway black hole took off in one direction, the two remaining black holes shot off in the other direction, according to the experts.
The team now hopes to use Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope to study the black hole further and confirm this explanation.
BLACK HOLES HAVE A GRAVITATIONAL PULL SO STRONG NOT EVEN LIGHT CAN ESCAPE
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them – not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them. Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood. Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun’s mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go ‘supernova’, a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
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