"Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. Four Successful Women Behind the Hubble Space Telescope's Achievements.Characterizing Planets Around Other Stars.Measuring the Universe's Expansion Rate.
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