Black holes rank among the strangest space phenomena in the universe. Thanks to the impressive gravitational force that they register, nothing is able to escape them, not even light. Therefore, studying them is very complex, since it depends on everything that happens around them, which is usually in ring-shaped and thousands of light-years away.
There are a lot of black holes scattered throughout space. The first image of our galaxy was only taken in 2019 and each one has registered different behaviors in its surroundings.
However, on none of them had a trail of massive stars been detected on their universal journey. It is impressive how, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, shared by NASA and ESA, the black hole and its trail have been captured in an image.
It is a trail that extends at least 200,000 light-years away. That’s twice the size of the Milky Way, according to data obtained from the site tech blog. The black hole in question, located in the supermassive characteristic, has a mass of 20 million suns.
They explain that this behavior of giving birth to new stars in its path is due to the fact that the gas cools down on its journey, and this causes a collision with the heat of movement and radiation from an accretion disk. On its very journey, a glowing knot of ionized oxygen can be seen.
“This is pure chance that we stumbled across it. He was scanning the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, ‘oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera’s detector and causing a linear image artifact.’ When we removed the cosmic rays we realized that it was still there. It was unlike anything we’ve seen before,” said Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University.