NASA's Hubble telescope stumbles upon a black hole and its 200,000 light years long trail of infant stars

In what is being described as a "happy accident," the Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a runaway black hole and its trail of infant stars. What is special about this is that in what could've been a tussle with two other black holes, this supermassive black hole was ejected from its own galaxy. Additionally, its trail of infant stars is an astounding 200,000 light-years long chain. This "contrail" of newborn starts as per Science Daily is twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.

The black hole is huge — it has a mass equivalent to around 20 million suns — and is travelling a such a breakneck speed that it can cover the 382,500 kilometres distance between our planet Earth and its moon in just 14 minutes.

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Black holes are notorious for gobbling up stars in their wake, but this one is different. It is moving too fast to act like a "cosmic Pac-Man" and snack on whatever crosses its path. Instead, as per Science Daily, it is "plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor," which is forming its trail of newborn stars.

This unique behaviour has astounded scientists who say that nothing like this has ever been seen before.

Talking about the discovery, Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, said: "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole."

Reportedly, the trail is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to. This means it must have lots of new stars.

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," adds Dokkum.

Astronomers believe that this astounding phenomenon is the result of multiple collisions of three supermassive black holes, two of which must have collided around 50 million years ago. This collision would have created a binary black hole.

'Two's company and three's a crowd," when another blackhole joined the mix, it created a chaotic and unstable configuration and one of the three was thrown out. The single black hole travelled in one direction, the pair in another. As per the astronomers, this could be deduced by circumstantial evidence; there is no active black hole remaining in that galaxy's centre. To confirm these theories, they will now conduct follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope might also provide some insight.

(With inputs from agencies)

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