.webp)
James Webb Space Telescope captures unprecedented movement and star production from a record-breaking black hole.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) infrastructure has provided evidence of a run-away supermassive black hole (10 million solar masses) travelling at an astonishing speed 2.2 million mph across the cosmos. This will be the first documented occurrence of a run-away supermassive black hole in history and also represents some of the most rapid movement ever recorded by astronomers, travelling through the Cosmic Owl Galaxy at a speed of 3,000 times greater than the speed of sound. The run-away black hole is also producing a galaxy-sized "wake," made from the material it is sucking into its path and producing stars at the same time across a distance of 200,000 light years.
“I’m amazed!” said Pieter van Dokkum from Yale University’s Discovery Team. “To propel a supermassive black hole requires an enormous amount of energy. However, we anticipated that these would occur.” In 2023, van Dokkum and colleagues used the Hubble Space Telescope to detect a runaway supermassive black hole moving through space, and had strong indications of a large mass moving through the universe as well. As with all black holes there is an event horizon associated with this runaway black hole, which provides a ‘surface’ that nothing can escape from.
“Since the black hole is in the darkest part of space, visualizing it is difficult,” continued van Dokkum. “We have identified methods for detecting the runaway supermassive black hole via its interactions with other cosmic objects. In particular, we found that the runaway supermassive black hole is creating a shockwave in the surrounding gas, and we observe the shockwave between the gas and the runaway black hole.”
.webp)
.webp)
