– He’s never seen anything like it

At first, the astrophysicist thought it was just scratches on images from NASA’s Hubble Telescope that caused this strange phenomenon.

The researcher believes that it can only be a technical error. What he saw was unlike anything he or anyone else had seen before.

– It was pure coincidence that we stumbled upon it, it didn’t look like anything we’d seen before, says Peter van Dokkum and NASA.

“invisible monster”

Van Dokkum detected a columnar formation of newborn stars. The thread was 200,000 light-years long, twice the diameter of the Milky Way, and traced back to a galaxy as far away as a trail of bread crumbs.

What we’re seeing are the repercussions, like a wake behind a ship, he says.

The “ship” is 20 million times heavier than our Sun, and is completely invisible, but Van Dokkum had no doubts about what he had discovered.

It was a supermassive black hole he saw. And he was on the go, really on the go.

The “invisible beast,” as NASA calls it, traveled fast enough to go from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. By comparison, Apollo 11 – the vehicle that brought the first humans to the moon – took four days, six hours and 45 minutes.

This means that the newly discovered black hole is moving at more than 400 times faster than a man-made rocket.

“Strange pool game”

NASA states that the supermassive hole may have been ejected from its home galaxy with something reminiscent of an “alien pool game”.

Supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole.

There are many hypotheses about why and how such supermassive black holes form, but one of the most popular theories is that many smaller black holes are attracted by the massive gravitational forces to each other and eventually merge into a truly amazing giant.

Astronomers believe that the newly discovered black hole may be the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. They suspect that two supermassive black holes met at the center of the original galaxy approximately 50 million years ago.

There they swirled around each other, until another supermassive black hole appeared. The three giants began to influence each other, resulting in a chaotic and unstable formation that ended with one of them being expelled from the galaxy, destined for great nothingness.

Stars give birth

NASA astronomers say that such an exiled supergiant would normally attract and consume stars in front of it, like an “intergalactic Pac-Man.”

But again, the newly discovered supermassive black hole was a surprise to scientists. They believe that the accretion of gas, plasma and space dust is heated and set in motion by the motion of the supergiant, which is then cooled.

Van Dokkum said, “We see rebirths behind the black hole as gas clouds cool down and are therefore able to form stars, so we see massive star formation behind them.

It is still just a matter of theories, he explains.

– How exactly it works is not yet known.

Van Dokkum describes the star trail as “so amazing, so bright, so unusual”

May require machine learning

The next step, astronomers say, is to conduct follow-up observations with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

NASA’s upcoming Romanian Nancy Grace Space Telescope will have a wide view of the universe with the resolution of Hubble. As a survey telescope, observations of the new telescope may find more of these rare and unlikely “star streaks” elsewhere in the universe.

That would require machine learning with algorithms that are very good at finding specific oddities in a sea of ​​astronomical data, according to Peter van Dokkum.

Van Dokkum’s research paper on the discovery can be read in his book It’s all here.