A new black hole weighing 20 million Suns has been discovered thanks to the Hubble Telescope. This supermassive black hole left a trail two million light-years long.
A supermassive black hole weighing 20 million Suns, incidentally caught by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, left behind a dense trail of newborn stars two million light-years long and twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. According to NASA’s measurements, this fast-moving black hole could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes if it were in our solar system.
The black hole left a trail of two million light-years in its wake
According to research by astronomers, this black hole may have formed when two galaxies came together and turned into a black hole about 50 million years ago. “I was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. I was scanning the Hubble image and then I noticed a little line. I thought it was a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact,” said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University. “When we eliminated the cosmic rays, we realized it was still there. It was unlike anything we’ve seen before. It’s pure chance that we stumbled across it.” said.
Continuing his explanations, Dokkum said, “We think we see an awakening behind the black hole, where the gas cools and can form stars. That’s why we examine the star formation that follows the black hole.” said. Given that the trail is almost half as bright as the galaxy it is attached to, it is estimated to have many new stars.
