A runaway black hole is tearing apart the universe, leaving behind a never-before-seen trail of stars, NASA says.
This supermassive black hole weighs as much as 20 million suns — and it’s traveling so fast, if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the moon in 14 minutes.
It leaves trails of newborn stars 200,000 light-years long, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.
This phenomenon was discovered by accident nasaThe astronomer who discovered it said the sighting was “pure serendipity.”
“It doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen before,” says Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University.
The star trail is “very amazing, very, very bright, very unusual,” he said, describing it as the wake of a ship.
From this he concluded that he was observing the aftermath of a black hole flying through the halo of gas surrounding its host galaxy.
The researchers believe that stars are created when a black hole rushes into the gas in front of it.
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The supermassive black hole is likely the result of three black holes colliding. Scientists believe that two of these black holes merged about 50 million years ago, and then another galaxy added its own black hole.
One of the black holes is then thrown out of its host galaxy, one launching in one direction and the other two traveling in the opposite direction.
Scientists will conduct follow-up observations to confirm this explanation.
The team’s research was published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.