Supermassive black holes have been found at the center of almost every galaxysucking up anything unlucky to fall into its maw — including light itself — through unfathomable gravitational forces.
Even at the center of our own galaxyastronomers have spotted such a black holedubbed Sagittarius A*. Despite their frequent appearance in observationsthe mysterious astronomical objects largely remain a mystery. For nowwe can only guess at how they formed.
Nowan international team of astronomers claim to have made a baffling discovery with the help of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope: the first runaway supermassive black hole that’s rocketing away from its home at a staggeringpotentially record-setting speed of 2.2 million miles per hour.
As Space.com reportsif confirmed it wouldn’t just be the first object of its kind to have been spotted: it may be one of the fastest-moving celestial bodies ever detectedan intriguing new wrinkle in our efforts to better understand supermassive black holes.
It’s absolutely enormousclocking in at 10 million times the mass of the Sunand is careening through the “Cosmic Owl,” an interacting pair of galaxies around eight billion light-years away.
It’s also pushing a “bow-shock” of matter the size of an entire galaxy in front of itwhile allowing stars to form in an enormous 200,00 light-year-long tail of gas behind it.
“It boggles the mind!” Yale University Pieter van Dokkuman astronomer and lead author of a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper about the cosmic monstrositytold Space.com. “The forces that are needed to dislodge such a massive black hole from its home are enormous. And yetit was predicted that such escapes should occur!”
“This is the only black hole that has been found far away from its former home,” he added. “That made it the best candidate [for a] runaway supermassive black holebut what was missing was confirmation.”
The astronomer and his colleagues first spotted the intriguing object in 2023 using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. But thanks to its event horizon that sucks up lightit was “very difficult to detect when it is moving through empty space,” van Dokkum told Space.com.
But thanks to the JWSTthey were able to analyze a huge amount of gases the object was displacing in front of it.
“It is moving at approximately [620 miles] per secondfaster than just about any other object in the universe,” van Dokkum told the site. “It is this high speed that enabled the black hole to escape the gravitational force of its former home.”
The researchers suggest the supermassive black hole may have collided with a different onereleasing an enormous wave of gravitational waves and ejecting it at enormous speeds. Alternativelythe black hole smashed into a binary black hole systemcausing it to become unstablethe result of a “three-body interaction,” according to van Dokkum.
The team believes this particular runaway supermassive black hole was more likely to have been ejected by smashing into a single black hole.
“Mergers happen often in the life of a galaxy; each galaxy with the size and mass of the Milky Way has experienced several during its lifetime,” van Dokkum told Space.com. “So black hole binaries should form pretty regularly.”
“What we don’t know is how quickly these binaries mergeif at alland how often the resulting kick removes a black hole,” he added. “My view is empirical: now that we know how to look for themwe can find other examples — and then we can answer the question directly from databy counting the number of escapes.”
More on supermassive black holes: Bizarre “Infinity Galaxy” Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes