A bright streak stretching away from a remote galaxy might be the light from stolen gas and new stars caught in the wake of an escaping black hole.
Alternatively, the black hole could have been spat out of a smashup among three galaxies. When a third galaxy joins an ongoing merger, three supermassive black holes jockey for position. One black hole can be tossed out of the galactic smashup, while the other two take off more slowly in the other direction.
That’s what van Dokkum thinks happened in this case. There are signs of a shorter, dimmer streak heading in the opposite direction from the bright, straight line. More observations of this system, perhaps with the James Webb Space Telescope, are needed to confirm that it really is an ejected supermassive black hole, Angus says. More theoretical calculations of what a runaway supermassive black hole should look like would help too.
The finding motivates Angus to search through archived data for more potential black hole streaks. “I wonder if there are more of these features out there, sitting in someone’s data that might have just been missed,” she says. Van Dokkum does too. “Now that we know what to look for, these very thin streaks, it makes sense to go back to Hubble data. We have 25 years of Hubble images that have not been searched with this purpose,” he says. “If there are more to be found, I think we can do it.”
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