A runaway black hole could be tearing its way through space, leaving a trail of new stars in its wake

‘There’s an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes.’

These are the words of Nasa, explaining the latest incredible phenomenon captured by the agency’s Hubble telescope – a runaway black hole creating a trail of stars twice the diameter of the Milky Way in its wake.

The supermassive black hole, which could weigh 20million times as much as our Sun, was likely the result of a ‘bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes’. Astronomers believe the extraordinary event began 50million years ago when two galaxies merged together, resulting in two supermassive black holes spinning around one another.

Then a third galaxy, with its own supermassive black hole, came to crash the party. The result? One of the black holes was thrown out of the gathering, blasting off in one direction while the other two headed the other way.

‘Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor,’ a Nasa statement said.

‘The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope.’

‘It’s pure serendipity that we stumbled across it,’ says Yale’s Pieter van Dokkum, who was actually looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. 

‘I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, “oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact”. When we eliminated cosmic rays we realised it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before.’

Astronomers will now complete follow-up observations with Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

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