Astronomers have detected a runaway black hole, apparently ejected from its home galaxy and creeping through space with a trail of stars following in its wake.
Researchers found the fleeing black hole as a bright streak of light while they used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the dwarf galaxy RCP 28, located about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth.
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Astronomers have detected a runaway black hole, apparently ejected from its home galaxy and creeping through space with a trail of stars following in its wake.
According to the team’s research, which was posted on a prepress server arXiv.org(Opens in a new tab) Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, this discovery provides the first observational evidence that supermassive black holes can be ejected from their home galaxies to traverse interstellar space.
Researchers found the fleeing black hole as a bright streak of light while they used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the dwarf galaxy RCP 28, located about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth.
A five-step diagram showing two black holes in a binary partnership before a third black hole intervenes, upsetting the balance at the galactic center and sending one of the black holes into intergalactic space. Panel 6 shows the gas trajectory observed in the new study. (Image credit: van Dokkum et al.)
Follow-up observations showed that the jet line is more than 200,000 light-years long — about twice the width of the Milky Way — and is thought to be made of compressed gas actively forming stars. Gas is sucking in a black hole estimated to be 20 million times the mass of the Sun and moving away from our home galaxy at 3.5 million miles per hour (5.6 million km/h), about 4,500 times the speed of sound.
According to the researchers, the sequence points directly to the center of the galaxy, where a supermassive black hole would normally reside.
“We found a thin line in the Hubble image that points to the center of a galaxy,” said the study’s lead author. Peter van Dokkum(Opens in a new tab), Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University, for Live Science. “Using the Keck telescope in Hawaii, we discovered that the line and the galaxy are connected. From a detailed analysis of the feature, we have concluded that we see an extremely massive black hole that has been ejected from the galaxy, leaving behind gas and newly formed stars in its wake.”
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