Hubble Space Telescope Runaway Black Hole Star Trail
NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has possibly observed a runaway black hole that is leaving a trail of stars in its wake. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 millino Suns, is barreling through intergalactic space and leaving a 200,000-light-year-long contrail of newborn stars, or twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy.



Astronomers believe that we’re viewing the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. The black hole is located at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy, while a bright knot of ionized oxygen can be seen at the outermost tip. The gas is most likely being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting it, or just simply radiation from an accretion disk.

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Hubble Space Telescope Runaway Black Hole Star Trail

This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it. 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,” said Pieter van Dokkum, Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University.

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