Streaks of light emerging from the centers of galaxies are not uncommon these are usually astrophysical jets, powerful, narrow streams of plasma traveling at near light speeds, launched from the polar regions of active supermassive black holes. ![]() Some of the ionization could be explained by the presence of very young, hot, massive stars that's consistent with astrophysical shocks, which tend to compress gas and cause clumps of it to collapse under gravity, forming baby stars. ![]() It also shows signs of strong ionization, and shock regions. Looking more closely, they found that the streak was not uniform in color or brightness. The team had never seen anything like it. This gave them a size: the streak measures over 200,000 light-years in length.Īnalysis showed that the galaxy and the streak have the same redshift, meaning that they are likely associated with each other, and the streak and galaxy have the same color. So, in October 2022, they took follow-up images using the Keck Observatory, to calculate the redshift of the galaxy and streak. Initially, the researchers thought it was a cosmic ray, but it showed up in both the filters used to process the images. The image revealed a bright streak pointing straight at the center of an irregular galaxy. It was in that image that they discovered something that might just be the trail of a runaway supermassive black hole. The researchers were using Hubble to study a much closer dwarf galaxy called RCP 28. The discovery was made in the course of other investigations. This is what van Dokkum and his colleagues proposed: that the trail of an ejected supermassive black hole might be detected in the gas that surrounds a galaxy, known as the circumgalactic medium. However, something as weighty as a supermassive black hole – millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun – might still leave behind tracks we can spot. And those that are quietly minding their business between snacks, just hanging out doing their thing, emit no light we can detect and are therefore essentially invisible to our technology. ![]() This process generates insane amounts of heat and light, which makes them much easier to spot.īut not all black holes are active. In fact, astronomers have already identified what they think might be multiple supermassive black holes ejected from the centers of their galaxies (although none yet crossing into intergalactic space), and even one galaxy that appears to be missing its supermassive black hole altogether.īut those supermassive black holes all had one thing in common: they're active, which means they're surrounded by a cloud of material that's falling into their gaping mouths of doom. The idea that a supermassive black hole could be ejected from its galaxy isn't actually that strange. ![]() The research, led by astrophysicist Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University, has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available on preprint server arXiv. The team's work shows one way we could identify quiescent supermassive black holes ejected from their galaxies to zoom, invisible and untethered, through intergalactic space. Although the black hole itself is invisible, its wake is not: shocks left in the tenuous intergalactic medium leave behind a trail of star formation in the compressed gas.
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