That stellar stream is the clinching evidence, van Dokkum says. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii revealed instead that the streak was a stream of young blue stars stretching across an astonishing 200,000 light-years. ![]() Further observations via the ground-based W. Such features are usually artifacts of cosmic rays striking Hubble’s detectors, explains lead study author Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale University. That black hole was discovered by chance when it first appeared as a faint linear streak in a Hubble Space Telescope observation of globular clusters. How do they escape their galactic host, and how can they be seen when they emit no light at all? Across the past decade, astronomers have only managed to identify a small number of other candidate nomads darkly drifting through the intergalactic depths-but none of these, the study authors say, are as convincing as their newfound escapee. ![]() They often only betray their presence with the celestial fireworks they create while swallowing immense volumes of gas and dust from their host galaxy.Īll this makes supermassive black holes that have somehow “gone rogue” a strange and elusive breed. Despite their terrifying dimensions, these mysterious giants are usually quite inert and easy to overlook. The discovery is detailed in a paper published on April 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.įor reasons that are still poorly understood, supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of most large galaxies such as our own Milky Way. At least that’s the conclusion of an international team of researchers who found and studied the candidate runaway using some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. What’s invisible, weighs 20 million suns and zooms through space at more than 1,500 kilometers per second, leaving a long starry trail in its wake? If you guessed “a supermassive black hole that has escaped its host galaxy,” you’re probably right.
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