Science has captured the first ‘sleeping’ black hole fleeing its galaxy. discovery

A completely invisible supermassive black hole was captured by telescopes as it “escaped” from the galaxy to which it belongs. This was discovered by a group of researchers led by Yale University in the study (under publication) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, which is available on the arXiv platform.

The black hole, in particular, is located 7.5 billion light-years away and has been currently traveling through space at 1,600 kilometers per second for about 39 million years. It is a dormant black hole, and the definitive evidence of its existence has been immortalized by what is defined in the scientific field as a “smoking gun”, or the trace of infant stars left behind by an object, generated in particular by superheating. intergalactic gas due to its passage. This is not a rare occurrence, cases of this kind have already been identified over the years. The peculiarity of the discovery must be attributed to the fact that it is an inactive black hole.

The researchers, led by Pieter van Dokkum, had in fact become aware of the UFO’s existence purely by accident, while intent on studying much closer images of the dwarf galaxy photographed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency (ESA). ), which then revealed the existence of the bright trail stars in the formation stage. According to scientists, it could all have started because of the merger of two galaxies that would have caused the black holes to orbit each other. To disturb the dormancy that existed until recently, a third galaxy, with its black hole, caused the expulsion of one of the three objects.

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