Sam Amico
Things appear to be getting spooky in outer space. That’s because there seems to be a “runway” black hole spiraling through the universe, with NASA referring to it as a “monster on the loose.”
Videos by Rare
Well, that can’t be good.
As NASA described it in a press release, this “invisible monster” is “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.”
Not only that, but the supermassive black hole created a trail of stars that had never before been witnessed. Namely, it left behind a 200,000-light-year-long “contrail” of newborn stars that turned out to be twice the diameter of the Milky Way.
That probably isn’t good, either.
A ‘Invisible Monster’
“We think we’re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we’re looking at star formation trailing the black hole,” Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University said, via the New York Post. “What we’re seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole.”
Interestingly, NASA said this monster on the loose was captured by Hubble Space Telescope on accident.
“This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it,” van Dokkum said. “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 realized it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before.”
The black hole weighs 20 million suns and was most likely caused by multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. So it has become the king of all black holes, basically.
“Scientists said the next step is to confirm the explanation behind the black hole using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory for follow-up observations,” the Post relayed.
How can they possibly know how much it weighs?