Home/News/Hubble spots runaway black hole leaving behind a trail of new stars Hubble spots runaway black hole leaving behind a trail of new stars

 If confirmed, the first-of-its-kind find would serve as convincing observational evidence that supermassive black holes can indeed be ejected from their parent galaxies.

This illustration shows the suspected runaway black hole and the thin trial of new stars linking it back to the parent galaxy it was apparently tossed out of.

NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

Astronomers think they’ve discovered a black hole some 20 million times the mass of the Sun speeding away from the core of a distant galaxy. And as the supermassive black hole barrels through intergalactic space, it’s compressing the scant gas and dust available out there, leaving behind a thin line of newly formed stars that's some 200,000 light-years long.

"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University, who first identified the star trail, in a NASA release. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship, we're seeing the wake behind the black hole."

Despite being relatively thin, the black hole’s stellar wake is packed with plenty of hot blue stars, making it nearly half as bright as the parent galaxy it traces back to. Based on the available evidence, the researchers think this black hole was likely ejected during a complex dance between three supermassive black holes that were involved in a pair of galaxy mergers. If confirmed, this would be the first observational evidence showing that supermassive black holes can be ejected from their parent galaxies.

A paper detailing the candidate runaway black hole and its stellar wake was published April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

But it wasn’t an accretion disk that gave away this black hole. It was the unusual linear streak seemingly linking it to a nearby galaxy, which van Dokkum first noticed in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. He and his team later confirmed the streak is indeed linked to the galaxy with follow-up observations taken with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. 

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," said van Dokkum, who was initially looking at the Hubble image to investigate an unrelated dwarf galaxy. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak.” He says he initially almost dismissed it as an imaging artifact, but “[w]hen we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."

The researchers also investigated the possibility that the streak was an astrophysical jet shooting from the black hole core of the nearby galaxy — which is not an uncommon sight. But the streak gets stronger farther from the core of the galaxy, and it doesn’t fan out at the end, leading the researchers to conclude the streak is instead a trail of new stars.

At the outer tip of the streak, where the suspected black hole is thought to be, the researchers also see evidence of a shock wave in front of the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas," said van Dokkum. "How it works exactly is not really known."

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Chandra X-ray Observatory identifies new stellar danger to planets

Astronomers using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes have identified a new threat to life on planets like Earth: a phase during which intense X-rays from exploded stars can affect planets over 100 light-years away. This result, as outlined in our latest press release, has implication for the study of exoplanets and their habitability.

This newly found threat comes from a supernova's blast wave striking dense gas surrounding the exploded star, as depicted in the upper right of our artist's impression. When this impact occurs it can produce a large dose of X-rays that reaches an Earth-like planet (shown in the lower left, illuminated by its host star out of view to the right) months to years after the explosion and may last for decades. Such intense exposure may trigger an extinction event on the planet.

A new study reporting this threat is based on X-ray observations of 31 supernovae and their aftermath—mostly from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Swift and NuSTAR missions, and ESA's XMM-Newton—show that planets can be subjected to lethal doses of radiation located as much as about 160 light-years away. Four of the supernovae in the study (SN 1979C, SN 1987A, SN 2010jl, and SN 1994I) are shown in composite images containing Chandra data in the supplemental image.

The paper describing this result appears in the April 20, 2023 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.Prior to this, most research on the effects of supernova explosions had focused on the danger from two periods: the intense radiation produced by a supernova in the days and months after the explosion, and the energetic particles that arrive hundreds to thousands of years afterward.

If a torrent of X-rays sweeps over a nearby planet, the radiation could severely alter the planet's atmospheric chemistry. For an Earth-like planet, this process could wipe out a significant portion of ozone, which ultimately protects life from the dangerous ultraviolet radiation of its host star. It could also lead to the demise of a wide range of organisms, especially marine ones at the foundation of the food chain, leading to an extinction event.

After years of lethal X-ray exposure from the supernova's interaction, and the impact of ultraviolet radiation from an Earth-like planet's host star, a large amount of nitrogen dioxide may be produced, causing a brown haze in the atmosphere, as shown in the illustration. A "de-greening" of land masses could also occur because of damage to plants.

A separate artist's impression (panel #1) depicts the same Earth-like planet as having been abundant with life at the time of the nearby supernova, years before most of the X-ray's impacts are felt (panel #2).Among the four supernovae in the set of images, SN 2010jl has produced the most X-rays. The authors estimate it to have delivered a lethal dose of X-rays for Earth-like planets less than about 100 light-years away.

There is strong evidence—including the detection in different locations around the globe of a radioactive type of iron—that supernovae occurred close to Earth between about 2 million and 8 million years ago. Researchers estimate these supernovae were between about 65 and 500 light-years away from Earth.

Although the Earth and the solar system are currently in a safe space in terms of potential supernova explosions, many other planets in the Milky Way are not. These high-energy events would effectively shrink the areas within the Milky Way galaxy, known as the Galactic Habitable Zone, where conditions would be conducive for life as we know it.

Because the X-ray observations of supernovae are sparse, particularly of the variety that strongly interact with their surroundings, the authors urge follow-up observations of interacting supernovae for months and years after the explosion.

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Arizona astronomers race to make sense of brightest gamma ray burst ever seen

by Daniel Stolte, University of Arizona

Combined HST images WFC3/UVIS and WFC3/IR (F625W, F125W, F160W) of the GRB 221009A field, observed on 2022 December 4. Note the clear appearance of an underlying host galaxy, with a disklike morphology. GRB 221009A is slightly offset from the center of the apparent host, off the disk plane. Credit: The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2023). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/acbd50

University of Arizona astronomers have joined an international effort to study the aftermath of the brightest flash of gamma rays ever observed. Observations involving various UArizona telescopes and instruments provide astronomers with a "cosmic lab" to study how massive stars die.

On Oct. 9, a pulse of intense radiation swept through the solar system, so exceptional that astronomers quickly dubbed it the BOAT—the brightest of all time. The source was a gamma-ray burst, or GRB—the most powerful class of explosions in the universe.

The burst triggered detectors on numerous spacecraft, and observatories around the globe followed up. After combing through all of the data, astronomers can now characterize just how bright it was and better understand its scientific impact. Two research teams at the University of Arizona joined the international effort to obtain and analyze the data to better understand what causes these outbursts of cosmic proportions. Papers describing the results will appear in a focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This flash of gamma rays was the brightest burst ever recorded," said Kate Alexander, an assistant professor in the UArizona Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory, who co-authored one of the papers. "You would expect one of this magnitude about once in 10,000 years."

Observations of the burst span the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, and include data from many NASA and partner missions, including the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, NASA's NuSTAR observatory and even Voyager 1 in interstellar space. Alexander and other scientists presented new findings about the BOAT at the High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Waikoloa, Hawaii, on Tuesday.

The signal from the gamma ray burst, dubbed GRB 221009A, had been traveling for about 1.9 billion years before it reached Earth, making it among the closest known "long" GRBs, whose initial, or prompt, emission lasts more than two seconds. Astronomers think these bursts represent the birth cry of a black hole that formed when the core of a massive star collapsed under its own weight. As it quickly ingests the surrounding matter, the black hole blasts out jets in opposite directions containing particles accelerated to near the speed of light. These jets pierce through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays as they stream into space. As these streams of matter expand out into space, they crash into gas and dust around the star, producing long-lasting "afterglow" light that telescopes can detect across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.