The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a "200,000 light-year-long trail of newborn stars" that may have been left behind by a runaway supermassive black hole.<br /><br />Video Credit:<br />Black Hole Animation<br />NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman<br /><br />Image of Chandra X-Ray Observatory<br />NASA/CXC and J. Vaughan<br /><br />3 Black Hole Orbits and Slingshots<br />Image from paper “A candidate runaway supermassive black hole identified by shocks and star formation in its wake” by PI Pieter Von Dokkum et al.<br /><br />Schematic illustration of the runaway SMBH scenario as an explanation of the key observed features. Panels 1–5 show a “classical” slingshot scenario (e.g., Saslaw et al. 1974). The background of panel 6 is a frame from an Illustris TNG simulation (Pillepich et al. 2018)<br /><br />Music Credit:<br />“Unclaimed Space” by Peter Nickalls [PRS] via Atmosphere Music Ltd. [PRS] and Universal Production Music.
