![]() ![]() "The main thing is that we could estimate how fast it's going - 1,600 kilometers per second - and that it's hard to come up with anything else that would move that fast," Dokkum said. Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist. Indeed, the immense speed was a big clue to astronomers that this was in fact a supermassive black hole. It also appeared to trail a black hole that is estimated to measure 20 million times the mass of the Sun, and is moving at 4,500 times the speed of sound away from its home galaxy. In a follow-up observation, astronomers found that the streak appeared to measure more than 200,000 light-years long, which is twice the width of the Milky Way. Finding one that escaped from its parent galaxy would be an odd discovery indeed.ĭokkum and his colleagues have the Hubble Space Telescope to thank for this peculiar discovery, as the massive observatory caught a bright streak of light when astronomers were observing the dwarf galaxy RCP 28, which is about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. Occasionally, galactic centers might have two or more supermassive black holes orbiting each other in close proximity. ![]() The incredible amount of mass that supermassive black holes possess means that they are typically gravitationally bound to billions of stars. Just this week, astronomers observed a massive cloud of gas orbiting very close to our galaxy's supermassive black hole, which is predicted to swallow the gas cloud by 2036. These massive objects appear to eat stars and other stellar debris with alarming regularity. Typically having the mass of hundreds of millions or billions of suns, such objects form the centers of just about all observed galaxies. If our sun were to suddenly be replaced by a black hole of the same mass, the planets in our solar system would continue to orbit comfortably in the same positions.īut supermassive black holes are something much more rare. Contrary to popular belief, they aren't terrorizing objects that "suck" matter in indiscriminately - rather, they behave just like any other star-size object, albeit with an event horizon past which no matter may escape. Indeed, many stars faintly larger than our sun will end their lives as black holes. "There have been some candidates already, and this is also just a candidate until we are 100 percent sure that it is a black hole, but it's a good one and it's also the only one so far that has been found really outside of the galaxy where it's already been fully ejected."īlack holes are relatively common in the universe. "This has been predicted for more than 50 years, that these black holes could once in a while be ejected from galaxies," Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University, told Salon.
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