There’s an invisible giant monster on the loose!
It’s barreling through intergalactic space fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon
in 14 minutes.
But don’t worry, luckily this beast is very, very far away!
This potential supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind
a never-before-seen 200,000 light-year-long trail of newborn stars.
The streamer is twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.
It’s likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive
black holes.
Astronomers suspect that first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago.
That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers.
They whirled around each other until another galaxy came along with its own supermassive
black hole.
The three of them chaotically orbited around each other.
This unstable configuration couldn’t last, and eventually one of them was violently flung
out of the host galaxy.
Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, this speedy black hole is plowing into gas
in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor.
The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and
the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Also, NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view
of the universe with Hubble’s high resolution.
As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable
events elsewhere in the universe.
Hubble, once again showing us that the universe is full of fascinating phenomena!
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