Supermassive black holes have been found at the center of almost every galaxy, sucking up anything unlucky to fall into its maw — including light itself — through unfathomable gravitational forces.
Even at the center of our own galaxy, astronomers have spotted such a black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A*. Despite their frequent appearance in observations, the mysterious astronomical objects largely remain a mystery. For now, we can only guess at how they formed.
Now, an international team of astronomers claim to have made a baffling discovery with the help of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope: the first runaway supermassive black hole that’s rocketing away from its home at a staggering, potentially record-setting speed of 2.2 million miles per hour.
As Space.com reports, if confirmed it wouldn’t just be the first object of its kind to have been spotted: it may be one of the fastest-moving celestial bodies ever detected, an intriguing new wrinkle in our efforts to better understand supermassive black holes.
It’s absolutely enormous, clocking in at 10 million times the mass of the Sun, and is careening through the “Cosmic Owl,” an interacting pair of galaxies around eight billion light-years away.
It’s also pushing a “bow-shock” of matter the size of an entire galaxy in front of it, while allowing stars to form in an enormous 200,00 light-year-long tail of gas behind it.
“It boggles the mind!” Yale University Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer and lead author of a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper about the cosmic monstrosity, told Space.com. “The forces that are needed to dislodge such a massive black hole from its home are enormous. And yet, it was predicted that such escapes should occur!”
“This is the only black hole that has been found far away from its former home,” he added. “That made it the best candidate [for a] runaway supermassive black hole, but what was missing was confirmation.”
The astronomer and his colleagues first spotted the intriguing object in 2023 using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. But thanks to its event horizon that sucks up light, it was “very difficult to detect when it is moving through empty space,” van Dokkum told Space.com.
But thanks to the JWST, they were able to analyze a huge amount of gases the object was displacing in front of it.
“It is moving at approximately [620 miles] per second, faster than just about any other object in the universe,” van Dokkum told the site. “It is this high speed that enabled the black hole to escape the gravitational force of its former home.”
The researchers suggest the supermassive black hole may have collided with a different one, releasing an enormous wave of gravitational waves and ejecting it at enormous speeds. Alternatively, the black hole smashed into a binary black hole system, causing it to become unstable, the result of a “three-body interaction,” according to van Dokkum.
The team believes this particular runaway supermassive black hole was more likely to have been ejected by smashing into a single black hole.
“Mergers happen often in the life of a galaxy; each galaxy with the size and mass of the Milky Way has experienced several during its lifetime,” van Dokkum told Space.com. “So black hole binaries should form pretty regularly.”
“What we don’t know is how quickly these binaries merge, if at all, and how often the resulting kick removes a black hole,” he added. “My view is empirical: now that we know how to look for them, we can find other examples — and then we can answer the question directly from data, by counting the number of escapes.”
More on supermassive black holes: Bizarre “Infinity Galaxy” Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes
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