Jackie Appel
Sat, April 8, 2023
NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
Hubble just spotted a supermassive black hole zooming through the sky and leaving a star formation in its wake.
Rather than swallowing material it runs into, the black hole is dragging the material behind itself, and that material is coming together to form stars.
Researchers hope to follow up on this observation with JWST and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the sighting, and eventually use the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope to search for more of these fast-moving rogue black holes.
The James Webb Space Telescope gets all the headlines these days. That’s not to say the acclaim is undeserved—JWST takes outstandingly beautiful, high-res photos and is already revolutionizing the field of astronomical observation.
But it’s not the only space telescope putting in the work. The Hubble Space Telescope is still up in the sky making exciting discoveries. And recently, it spotted something truly unique.
According to a new study, Hubble spotted a rogue supermassive black hole that is actively forming stars in its wake. Rogue black holes are nothing new to science, but we’ve never before seen one move this fast or leave any kind of creation behind.
“This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it,” Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer from Yale and lead author on the study, said in a press release. “I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, ‘oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.’ When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before.”
That’s because it wasn’t like anything anyone has ever seen before. And it was spotted totally by accident—the team was originally looking for something called a globular cluster when they discovered this fast-moving black hole.
The supermassive black hole, which is likely around 20 million times the mass of our Sun, is zooming through the universe at about 3.5 million miles per hour. According to a NASA release, moving at that speed would get you from the Earth to the Moon in just 14 minutes.
It’s moving so fast, in fact, that it’s not swallowing anything in its path. By the time any new matter would fall into the monster black hole, it’s already moved on and dragged the material around into its wake.
In that wake, where the newly-collected gas is able to cool off after being hit by a speeding bullet of a black hole, there is enough material that the black hole has been triggering a string of new star formation. Bringing together all of that material has caused new stars to form as the black hole moves through the universe. There is now a string of brand new stars stretching 200,000 light years back from the location of the black hole to the galaxy researchers believe it came from.
NASA, ESA, Pieter van Dokkum (Yale); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
The team believes that the black hole probably got its speedy start in that galaxy. The dominant theory is that the galaxy used to contain a binary system of two supermassive black holes orbiting each other. Then, a rogue black hole flew into the mix, and the whole system became unstable, throwing a black hole out into the universe at impressive speed. Researchers also believe the binary was thrown in the other direction, and want to confirm its location in future observations.
Considering how novel this star-forming speedster of a supermassive black hole is, future observations are sure to follow. The plan now is to re-image the observation with the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to make sure that the black hole explanation for this striking sight is the correct one. And eventually, researchers have plans to use the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope to search for even more examples of this phenomenon.
No matter how long we look out at the universe, space continues to surprise us.
Hubble just spotted a supermassive black hole zooming through the sky and leaving a star formation in its wake.
Rather than swallowing material it runs into, the black hole is dragging the material behind itself, and that material is coming together to form stars.
Researchers hope to follow up on this observation with JWST and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the sighting, and eventually use the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope to search for more of these fast-moving rogue black holes.
The James Webb Space Telescope gets all the headlines these days. That’s not to say the acclaim is undeserved—JWST takes outstandingly beautiful, high-res photos and is already revolutionizing the field of astronomical observation.
But it’s not the only space telescope putting in the work. The Hubble Space Telescope is still up in the sky making exciting discoveries. And recently, it spotted something truly unique.
According to a new study, Hubble spotted a rogue supermassive black hole that is actively forming stars in its wake. Rogue black holes are nothing new to science, but we’ve never before seen one move this fast or leave any kind of creation behind.
“This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it,” Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer from Yale and lead author on the study, said in a press release. “I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, ‘oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.’ When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before.”
That’s because it wasn’t like anything anyone has ever seen before. And it was spotted totally by accident—the team was originally looking for something called a globular cluster when they discovered this fast-moving black hole.
The supermassive black hole, which is likely around 20 million times the mass of our Sun, is zooming through the universe at about 3.5 million miles per hour. According to a NASA release, moving at that speed would get you from the Earth to the Moon in just 14 minutes.
It’s moving so fast, in fact, that it’s not swallowing anything in its path. By the time any new matter would fall into the monster black hole, it’s already moved on and dragged the material around into its wake.
In that wake, where the newly-collected gas is able to cool off after being hit by a speeding bullet of a black hole, there is enough material that the black hole has been triggering a string of new star formation. Bringing together all of that material has caused new stars to form as the black hole moves through the universe. There is now a string of brand new stars stretching 200,000 light years back from the location of the black hole to the galaxy researchers believe it came from.
NASA, ESA, Pieter van Dokkum (Yale); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
The team believes that the black hole probably got its speedy start in that galaxy. The dominant theory is that the galaxy used to contain a binary system of two supermassive black holes orbiting each other. Then, a rogue black hole flew into the mix, and the whole system became unstable, throwing a black hole out into the universe at impressive speed. Researchers also believe the binary was thrown in the other direction, and want to confirm its location in future observations.
Considering how novel this star-forming speedster of a supermassive black hole is, future observations are sure to follow. The plan now is to re-image the observation with the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to make sure that the black hole explanation for this striking sight is the correct one. And eventually, researchers have plans to use the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope to search for even more examples of this phenomenon.
No matter how long we look out at the universe, space continues to surprise us.
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