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<ul class="summary-list"><li>A new photo of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-scientists-big-reveal-maybe-photo-milky-way-black-hole-2022-5">supermassive black hole at our galaxy's core</a> looks different from those before.</li><li>A groundbreaking collaboration of black-hole-imaging scientists published it on Wednesday.</li></ul>The supermassive black hole at the heart of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vanishing-radio-signals-mystery-objects-in-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-1">our galaxy</a> has a side you've never seen before.A new image shows <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-black-hole-magnetic-field-event-horizon-telescope-2021-3">powerful magnetic fields</a> swirling around our hometown black hole called Sagittarius A*, pronounced "A-star."The image is the latest innovation of a groundbreaking scientific collaboration called the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-snaps-first-image-messier-87-2019-4">Event Horizon Telescope</a>, or EHT, which rallied telescopes across the planet to focus on one black hole together, effectively creating an observatory as big as Earth.Five years ago, the EHT released <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-m87-2019-4">the first-ever photo of a supermassive black hole</a>, a feat thought to be impossible for decades because black holes are objects so dense that not even light can escape them, making them invisible.But the disc of ultra-hot material circling a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/listen-nasa-reveals-black-hole-sounds-spooky-audio-2022-8">black hole</a>, which you can see in the image below of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, is visible.<div type="image" title="first image of a black hole m87" height="1515" width="2600" msid="108827869" hostid="261"></div>Not long after that, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5">Sagittarius A*</a> got its moment in the limelight.Sagittarius A*'s 2022 portrait, below, looked quite similar to Messier 87's, even though Sagittarius A* is about 1,000 times smaller than Messier 87's black hole.<div type="image" title="black hole photo orange ring sagitarrius A*" height="2000" width="2000" msid="108827870" hostid="261"></div>But the new image released on Wednesday is different. It shows our galaxy's black hole in polarized light, which occurs when <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/colliding-black-holes-produce-light-astronomers-flare-first-time-2020-6">light waves</a> oscillate in a preferred direction.The new view below reveals a clear polarization pattern in the particles circling the black hole — which means powerful magnetic fields spiraling around the edge of Sagittarius A* affect them."What we're seeing now is that there are strong, twisted, and organized magnetic fields near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy," Sara Issaoun, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the co-lead of the project, said in a press release.<h2>A clue about the secret structure of supermassive black holes</h2>Sagittarius A* is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, so this image represents a very tiny point in the sky."This appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the moon," Issaoun said at a press conference presenting the first image of it in 2022.But the discovery of the magnetic-field lines offers a major clue about the behavior of supermassive black holes across the universe and how they eat the material surrounding them.The EHT had previously imaged its first black hole, Messier 87, in polarized light, though it doesn't look quite as striking.<div type="image" title="black hole image shows a glowing red disk with its lower half bright yellow full of streaks arcing outward" height="650" width="644" msid="108827872" hostid="261"></div>Since both black holes have similar magnetic-field structures despite their immense size difference, the EHT scientists now suspect that all supermassive black holes might have magnetic structures like this."We've learned that strong and ordered magnetic fields are critical to how black holes interact with the gas and matter around them," Issaoun said.The discovery also suggests that, like Messier 87, Sagittarius A* could have a jet of radiation and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-accelerators-cosmic-rays-rain-down-speed-of-light-2024-1">high-speed particles</a> shooting out of the black hole. We just can't see it yet.<div type="image" title="An artist's impression shows a jet of matter spewing from a black hole." height="2160" width="3840" msid="108827873" hostid="261"></div>The telescope observations that led to this new image took place in 2017, but the EHT is poised to cast its gaze at Sagittarius A* again in April.Issaoun and her collaborators published their findings in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday.<h2>Bigger black-hole breakthroughs may be in store</h2>Further imaging with new innovative techniques and technologies could reveal even more secrets of supermassive black holes, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-how-big-largest-universe-2019-5">both big and small</a>.The EHT aims to capture <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">video of our galaxy's black hole</a>, possibly by the end of the decade, Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist on the project, told Business Insider at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January."We think we're just scratching the surface of what can be done," Johnson said in a presentation at that meeting. "Even more exciting science is yet to come."To that end, the EHT recently added a telescope in Greenland to its worldwide array.Incorporating satellites into that array, thereby expanding the EHT observatory into space, could allow scientists to study dozens of black holes instead of just two. Johnson said that's likely to happen within a decade.

This new photo of a supermassive black hole is unlike any before, showing powerful magnetic fields spiraling around it

Sydney, Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of physicist Albert Einstein's expanding universe. Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant -- and hence ancient -- universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as 'clocks'. Quasars are the supermassive <keyword id="4740034" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="black-holes" source="Orion">black holes</keyword> at the centres of early galaxies. "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney. "If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second -- but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag," he said. In the research published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Lewis and his collaborator, Dr Brendon Brewer from the University of Auckland, used observed data from nearly 200 quasars to analyse this time dilation. "Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding," Lewis said. "This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today. "In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang." Previously, astronomers have confirmed this slow-motion universe back to about half the age of the universe using supernovae -- massive exploding stars -- as 'standard clocks'. But while supernovae are exceedingly bright, they are difficult to observe at the immense distances needed to peer into the early universe. By observing quasars, this time horizon has been rolled back to just a tenth the age of the universe, confirming that the universe appears to speed up as it ages.

After the Big Bang, universe is running 5x  slower: Scientists crack the mystery using supermassive black holes

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists have obtained the first ever proof that black holes can lose energy.</li><li>They've long believed that magnetic fields could suck energy out of black holes but didn't have proof — until now.</li></ul>Scientists have long believed that black holes, which generally swallow up everything around them, can also lose energy.But they didn't have proof — until now.A <a target="_blank" href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acf92d">new study</a> published this month found that the M87 supermassive black hole is emitting huge amounts of energy thanks to its magnetic field.Alexandru Lupsasca, a co-author of the study, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ias.edu/news/galactic-lightsabers-answering-longstanding-questions-about-jets-black-holes">said</a> the outflow jets "are basically like million-light-year-long Jedi lightsabers" and can be 10 times longer than the Milky Way galaxy.George Wong, the other co-author, said: "If you took the Earth, turned it all into TNT and blew it up 1,000 times a second for millions and millions of years, that's the amount of energy that we're getting out of M87."Space.com <a target="_blank" href="https://www.space.com/supermassive-black-hole-m87-losing-energy">noted</a> that Albert Einstein's theory of relativity predicted that black holes can lose energy and scientists have believed since the 1970s that magnetic fields can extract energy from black holes.But they didn't know how until now.M87 was famous in the scientific community even before this; <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-m87-2019-4">it was the first black hole ever imaged</a>, and a team of scientists from 20 countries worked for more than a decade to produce the photo.

A supermassive black hole is actually losing energy instead of gobbling it all up, new research shows

<ul class="summary-list"><li>NASA's JWST telescope spotted a bizarre galaxy that defies expectations. </li><li>Galaxy UHZ-1 formed around a huge black hole that existed surprisingly soon after the Big Bang.</li></ul>A bizarre galaxy spotted in the early days of the universe could rewrite how <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-holes-can-lose-energy-study-finds-m87-2023-11">supermassive black holes</a> are formed.Scientists have long wondered how supermassive black holes — the enormous, mysterious phenomena at the center of galaxies including our Milky Way — came into existence.A new observation of Galaxy UHZ-1, collected by NASA using its powerful new <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-smallest-brown-dwarf-2023-12">James Webb Space Telescope</a> and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, suggests an unusual origin.Per the agency, it could show that the supermassive black hole there was born directly from clouds of primordial gas.If confirmed, it would show, for the first time, that supermassive black holes are not always formed by dying stars.Such a discovery "changes the game in understanding how these objects formed," said study lead author Priyamvada Natarajan <a target="_blank" href="https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/black-hole-discovery/">while speaking to Science Friday</a>, a non-profit science-education organization."It is simply too big too early. It's like looking in at a kindergarten classroom and there among all the 5-year-olds is one that is 150 pounds and/or six feet tall," Daniel Holz, a theorist at the University of Chicago who studies black holes, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/science/space/astronomy-black-holes.html">told The New York Times</a>."Priya has found an extremely exciting black hole, if true," he said.Chandra X-ray Observatory first picked up the black hole by detecting X-rays let off by galaxy UHZ-1.The black hole inside, the observatory found, was a beast — estimated between 10 million and 100 million times as massive as the sun, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2402016-astronomers-have-found-the-most-distant-black-hole-ever-confirmed/">per New Scientist</a>.When JWST set out to figure out where the black hole was located, scientists got a shock: it was inside UHZ-1 about 13.2 billion light years away.The distance meant that this behemoth existed when the universe was very young, only about 470 million years after the Big Bang. It's the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-black-hole-james-webb-space-telescope-discovery-early-universe-2023-11">furthest-flung black hole ever recorded</a>.And that's puzzling. One theory for the formation of supermassive black holes is that they come to be over a long time, The Times reported.Stars at the beginning of the universe were small: they burned what was available, hydrogen and helium, which means they flamed out quickly, leaving smaller black holes about 10 to 100 times bigger than the sun in their wake, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasa-telescopes-discover-record-breaking-black-hole/">per a press release from NASA</a>.Over time, per this theory, black holes would merge, eventually forming supermassive black holes.But UHZ-1 provides "compelling evidence" for another theory, said study author Natarajan, who is a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale.Per this theory, black holes could be born big from the get-go. This type of galaxy, a big black hole surrounded by a small cloud of gas, could provide a heavy "seed" of a black hole that could grow into a supermassive black hole on its own.Natarajan and her colleagues have dubbed this type of cluster "overmassive black hole galaxies."The supermassive black holes, then, wouldn't be born from early stars. The best explanation instead, per Natarajan, is that they came from cosmic gas collapsing in on itself, creating seeds already weighing between about 10,000 and 100,000 suns."The fact that these start out in life overmassive implies that they will likely eventually evolve into supermassive black holes," said Natarajan, speaking to The Times."Nature does seem to make BH seeds many ways, beyond just stellar death!" she said, per the Times.To confirm their theory, scientists will need more evidence, said Fabio Pacucci at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, per New Scientist. "If this is at a 100 million solar masses it's pretty big, but if it's at 10 million solar masses it's not that big, so it could have possibly formed from a lighter seed," he said."Everything hinges on finding more of these objects, possibly more massive, possibly at even higher distances, to really understand how the first population of black holes formed."The findings were published in a peer-reviewed study in the <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://affiliate.insider.com?h=ff418302a659d6b07cc975f5a9d7b724d6f9dc51cc04519b80294a719b8f802e&amp;postID=658befea8aa21447965669b2&amp;postSlug=strange-galaxy-spotted-nasa-may-rewrite-theory-black-holes-2023-12&amp;site=bi&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41550-023-02111-9">journal Nature Astronomy</a> on November 6.

A bizarre galaxy NASA spotted at the edge of the universe could upend what we know about supermassive black holes      

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A star positioned near the center of the Milky Way seems to have come from outside of our galaxy. </li><li>The interloper is thought to have traveled from a galaxy that has since disappeared. </li></ul>Scientists have spotted a star near the center of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/young-stars-appear-milky-way-edge-galaxy-collision-2020-1">Milky Way</a> that shouldn't be there.A study published Monday suggests SO-6, a star located about 0.04 light-years from the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-black-hole-spinning-fast-squishing-space-time-2023-11">black hole at the center of our galaxy</a>, could be an extragalactic star that traveled more than 50,000 light years to reach our galaxy's heart.This is the first study to show that a star from outside our galaxy could end up in the middle of it.The findings could help explain a long-standing galactic mystery: where do stars near the black hole come from? <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-galaxy-black-hole-lights-up-suddenly-2019-8">Sagittarius A*</a>, the black hole inside our galaxy, is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-webb-space-telescope-spots-most-distant-supermassive-black-hole-2023-7">supermassive</a> so its gravity is too intense for stars to be born in that area.<div type="image" title="milky way galaxy with zoomed in section on black hole" height="1041" width="1041" msid="105845077" hostid="261" sizebytes="51246"></div>To identify its origins, a team of scientists led by Shogo Nishiyama at Miyagi University of Education in Japan, studied the stars's composition using the Subaru Telescope, a 26-foot-wide observatory in Hawaii.They found the star was made of chemicals more often seen in <a target="_blank" href="https://subarutelescope.org/en/results/2023/12/03/3319.html">smaller galaxies that float outside the Milky Way,</a> like the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy.The most likely theory is that SO-6 was born in a small galaxy that once orbited the Milky Way but has since disintegrated.The orphaned star, which is at least 10 billion years old, would have then been grabbed by the Milky Way's gravitational pull. It traveled at least 50,000 light years to reach Sagittarius A*, though it may have gone even farther than that as it's more likely to have gone in a spiral rather than a straight line.Scientists will now work to confirm the origin of SO-6, as well as determine if it traveled alone or with companions, lead scientist Nishiyama said."With further investigation, we hope to unravel the mysteries of stars near the supermassive black hole," he added.

A mysterious star from outside the Milky Way has somehow ended up near our galaxy's supermassive black hole

Astronomers on Tuesday said they found two supermassive <keyword id="12658259" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-holes" source="Orion">black holes</keyword> — the nearest pair to Earth ever discovered — that are merging into a single "monster."The cosmic couple was located 89 million light-years away from Earth in the galaxy NGC 7727, according to a study in the journal Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics.Scientists measured the mass of each black hole by watching how the pair's gravity affected the movement of nearby stars. Observations using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope revealed the black holes were just 1,600 light-years from each other in the sky, a tiny distance relatively."The small separation and velocity of the two black holes indicate that they will merge into one monster black hole, probably within the next 250 million years," Holger Baumgardt, a professor at the University of Queensland, Australia said in a <a href="https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2117/">statement</a>.The larger black hole contains the mass of 154 million suns, while its smaller partner is a still-whopping 6.3 million solar masses.But Karine Voggel, an astronomer at the Strasbourg Observatory in France and lead author on the study, said there is "no cause for concern.""No these two black holes are not dangerous to us!!" she wrote on <a href="https://twitter.com/KarinaVoggel/status/1466141436508782593?s=20">Twitter</a> after the discovery was announced. "They are astronomically close but that is still *really* far away from us."

Astronomers find 2 supermassive black holes — the nearest to Earth ever discovered — are merging into a 'monster'

<ul class="summary-list"><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-best-images-from-first-year-2022-12">NASA's James Webb Space Telescope</a> discovered the most distant active <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-image-possible-first-rogue-roaming-supermassive-black-hole-2023-3">supermassive black hole</a> to date.</li><li>The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/listen-nasa-reveals-black-hole-sounds-spooky-audio-2022-8">black hole</a> has the mass of 9 million suns. It existed just 570 million years after the Big Bang. </li></ul>The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/times-nasa-webb-space-telescope-spotted-something-hubble-missed">James Webb Space Telescope</a> has made another unprecedented discovery in the early universe: a supermassive black hole that appeared too soon after the Big Bang for scientists to explain.NASA's Webb observatory is the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hubble-vs-webb-new-nasa-telescope-reveals-details-early-universe-2022-11">most powerful</a> ever launched into space. It can see <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet">farther into the cosmos</a> and the distant past than any prior telescope.That's how it spotted a supermassive <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-hawking-theory-could-mean-entire-universe-will-evaporate-2023-6">black hole</a> just over 570 million years after the Big Bang in a galaxy called CEERS 1019, researchers announced on Thursday. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/space-collision-gravitational-waves-reveal-impossible-black-hole-2020-9"></a><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/space-collision-gravitational-waves-reveal-impossible-black-hole-2020-9">Black holes</a> have so much condensed matter in such a small space that light can't escape their gravity, making them invisible. However, it's possible to see the gas, stars, and other cosmic matter surrounding them, which is how Webb detected this one.<div type="image" title="Images and a graph from the James Webb Space Telescope showing the most distant supermassive black hole which appears as three bright clumps" height="1500" width="2000" msid="101581079" hostid="261" sizebytes="84860"></div>"Until now, research about objects in the early universe was largely theoretical," astronomer Steven Finkelstein, one of the leads of the study <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/collections/apjl-230504-220_Focus-on-CEERS-JWST-Survey" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published</a> in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, <a href="https://cns.utexas.edu/news/research/webb-telescope-detects-most-distant-active-supermassive-black-hole" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said in a statement</a>. "With Webb, not only can we see black holes and galaxies at extreme distances, we can now start to accurately measure them. That's the tremendous power of this telescope."Scientists still don't know how supermassive black holes formed in such a short period of time following the birth of the universe. But with Webb, they can measure these cosmic monsters' size and distance from Earth to better understand them, and this latest discovery breaks several records.<h2>Webb shows details of the supermassive black hole's size and structure</h2><div type="image" title="james webb space telescope artist illustration gold panels octagon on purple foil platform" height="1708" width="2277" msid="101581081" hostid="261" sizebytes="356814"></div>Not only is this mysterious beast the earliest supermassive black hole ever observed, it's also the most distant active supermassive black hole on record.The distant black hole "is ravenous, consuming gas, dust, and stars at the highest theoretically possible rate for its size," the <a href="https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/114/01H28ZJP116PKERF6Z6NHNFEAR" target="_blank" rel="noopener">research team notes</a>. Its size is another one of its surprising features. It's smaller than other black holes discovered in the universe's early phases.The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ultramassive-black-hole-33-billion-times-bigger-than-sun-durham-2023-3">black hole</a> is 9 million solar masses, while most others from the early universe are 1 billion solar masses or a billion times greater than the mass of the sun.For comparison, a 9 million solar mass black hole is closer to the size of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5">supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy</a>, the Milky Way.<h2>How did a black hole form so soon after the Big Bang?</h2>The team's work is part of the James Webb Space Telescope's Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, which observed two more small supermassive black holes in galaxies CEERS 2782 and CEERS 746."Now we think that lower-mass black holes might be all over the place, waiting to be discovered," said Dale Kocevski of Colby College, who led <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00012" target="_blank" rel="noopener">one of the studies</a>. In fact, researchers note that CEERS 1019 may only hold the record for the most-distant supermassive black hole for a few weeks because astronomers are reviewing other contenders that Webb identified.<div type="image" title="black hole photo orange ring sagitarrius A*" height="1500" width="2000" msid="101581083" hostid="261" sizebytes="22448"></div>Primordial black holes formed soon after the Big Bang, but the origin of the supermassive black hole in galaxy CEERS 1019 is mysterious. Future discoveries from the CEERS survey could provide clues to these black holes' formation.Another recent breakthrough lays out a new path for understanding how supermassive black holes and large galaxies formed so quickly after the Big Bang.Scientists recently found compelling evidence for <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/experiment-hears-space-time-ripples-confirms-gravitational-wave-background-2023-6">a sea of ripples in space-time permeating the universe</a>. These "gravitational waves" are likely the reverberations of collisions between supermassive black holes, going back toward the beginning of the universe.Someday astrophysicists may be able to follow those waves back to the early, merging black holes that made them. By studying such mergers, they can learn how black holes got to be so big so early, and how the first galaxies grew up so quickly too.

James Webb Space Telescope spots a supermassive black hole in the early universe, much sooner after the Big Bang than scientists can explain

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-starlink-satellites-streak-nasa-hubble-space-telescope-images-2023-3">NASA Hubble image</a> may show the first runaway supermassive <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/listen-nasa-reveals-black-hole-sounds-spooky-audio-2022-8">black hole</a> ever discovered.</li><li>A trail indicating an object traveling away from a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-hubble-space-telescope-photographs-three-galaxies-colliding-2022-2">galaxy</a> hints that a black hole got kicked out.</li></ul>The <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/times-nasa-webb-space-telescope-spotted-something-hubble-missed">Hubble Space Telescope</a> is still making <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/webb-infared-early-universe-hubble-ultraviolet-insights-breathtaking-images-2022-8">first-of-a-kind discoveries</a> after more than three decades in space. Its latest? Observations of the first ever supermassive black hole gone rogue from its own galaxy.That's what a team of astronomers is suggesting in a new <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.04888.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> posted online. The study has been peer reviewed for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, according to Pieter van Dokkum, an astrophysicist at Yale University who led the new study.Even experts not involved in the study are excited for the team's results."The observations are all fitting together with this scenario," Manuela Campanelli, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology not involved in the study but who has simulated runaway black holes in her research, told Insider.<h2>The first possible photo of a 'rogue' supermassive black hole</h2><div type="image" title="two images show distant bright spot galaxy with a faint trail going down and left" height="1326" width="2180" msid="98528396" hostid="261" sizebytes="196994"></div>What you're seeing above are two images of the same thing that tell the story of what happened.Look at the zoomed-in shot on the right: The big spot in the upper right is a galaxy. Then follow the faint line trailing away from it, which ends in a point on the lower left. That's where scientists think the runaway black hole is hiding.<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-detects-brightest-explosion-ever-recorded-star-collapsing-black-hole-2022-10">Black holes</a>, by their very nature, are invisible. The reason astronomers are able to "see" any black hole is because it's surrounded by a swirling hot disk of gas, stars, and other cosmic stuff that is visible.But the most fascinating part of these photos is the streak you see trailing behind the black hole. That's what caught researchers' eyes as they examined nearby stars.They think that long tail coming out of the black hole is actually a trail of newborn stars, which formed after the black hole was hurled from its home galaxy, and ripped through space, generating a shockwave that caused clouds of intergalactic gas to collapse into stars."I thought that I'd actually made an error that there was this weird streak in the image," van Dokkum told Insider. "It didn't look like any astrophysical objects at first. And then it turned out that it was real. It was also in other datasets. And that's when I got excited."Though black holes are notorious for devouring and destroying stars, this one seems to be creating them as well.Further observations, probably with the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-best-images-from-first-year-2022-12">James Webb Space Telescope</a>, are necessary to confirm that the object in the picture truly is a runaway supermassive black hole.<h2>Why a supermassive black hole would go rogue</h2><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-how-big-largest-universe-2019-5">Supermassive black holes</a> are mind-bogglingly dense objects with the mass of billions of suns, and scientists think there's one at the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5">center of every galaxy</a>. Needless to say, kicking one out of its home would take a lot of force.One such cataclysmic event that could possibly do the job is if two galaxies collide together, and their <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/two-supermassive-black-holes-nearest-earth-merging-into-monster-astronomers-2021-12">central black holes merge</a>. A collision between black holes is one of the most violent, forceful events in the universe, and it could send a smaller remnant black hole careening into the void.Astrophysicists have long theorized that black holes could "go rogue" or "run away," if other black holes pushed them out of their galaxies.But nobody has ever confirmed a black hole wandering through intergalactic space, much less a supermassive black hole going rogue.And while two galaxies colliding is the simplest explanation for a rogue black hole, that's not what seems to have happened here.<h2>2 other black holes may have expelled this one in a rare, violent event</h2>Van Dokkum thinks this black hole had an especially rare, dramatic, violent exit. Here's his theory: Two galaxies merged, and their supermassive black holes fell together, due to their sheer gravitational pull.That happens all the time. Hubble has photographed plenty of merging galaxies, like the ones in the image below. The next step is what made this merger so weird.<div type="image" title="hubble merging galaxies" height="960" width="1280" msid="98528398" hostid="261" sizebytes="53776"></div>The team thinks that a third galaxy arrived, with a third black hole, and its gravity caused a complex dance of the three black holes, which ended with ejecting one of them into the distance.<div type="image" title="two colorful galaxies merging in space" height="1425" width="1900" msid="98528401" hostid="261" sizebytes="41806"></div>Ever since then, over a period of 39 million years, the runaway black hole has been screaming away from its home galaxy at a speed of about 1,600 kilometers (nearly 1,000 miles) per second, according to van Dokkum's team's calculations. For reference, at that speed it would take you 25 seconds to circle the entire Earth.Basically, this supermassive black hole (if that's what it is) got third-wheeled and kicked out of its own home. Evidence for this third galaxy is yet to be confirmed, but the team is investigating a trail they see on the opposite side of the galaxy, where they think the other two black holes merged and then got kicked out by the recoil."The picture really tells the story," van Dokkum said.That makes this event exceptionally rare, Campanelli said, because it involved three black holes instead of the conventional two that theorists typically pose in a scenario like this.<h2>Follow the trail of newborn stars — if it's not just a jet</h2>The other explanation for the mysterious trail in van Dokkum's Hubble photo is a fairly common one: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-plasma-jets-image-centaurus-galaxy-2021-7">jets of material that shoot out</a> from the centers of galaxies with highly active black holes.But van Dokkum and Campanelli both say that's unlikely, based on the shape of the trail in the new picture. Jets shooting from galactic centers fan out away from the galaxy, as the material shoots from a point and spreads out in the distance, like what's shown in the Hubble image below:<div type="image" title="pink cloudy jets shoot out from galaxy" height="1497" width="1997" msid="98528404" hostid="261" sizebytes="183674"></div>Instead, the trail in van Dokkum's Hubble image fans out toward the galaxy. It seems to be a trail of new stars that formed as the traveling black hole generated shock waves in the intergalactic gas.Campanelli added that the compact and irregular shape of the galaxy is "typical" of galaxies formed from mergers."If it turns out to be not real, I'll be surprised," van Dokkum said. "If it's not real, I think it is actually a combination of a few other gas clouds or something that seemed to line up in such a way that it looks like a streak."Even though they're invisible, there's no reason to worry about rogue supermassive black holes sneaking up on us from other galaxies."We would have seen the effects of it if it was anywhere near us," van Dokkum said.

NASA image may show first-ever 'rogue' supermassive black hole, leaving a trail of newborn stars in its wake

<ul class="summary-list"><li>The jets were captured being released from a black hole 6.5 billion times the size of our sun.</li><li>The image is the first to connect the jets to the edge of the supermassive black hole. </li></ul>Scientists have captured the first-ever direct image of a supermassive black hole spewing out powerful jets of plasma.The black hole, located at the center of the M87 galaxy 55 million light-years away, is around 6.5 billion times bigger than our sun.Jets launched from black holes can flow for hundreds of thousands of light years and are one of the universe's biggest mysteries.Astronomers hope the latest discovery will help us understand exactly how these jets are created — something that could help unlock the mystery of how galaxies form. <h2>Black holes don't only swallow matter, they sometimes shoot it out </h2>Most galaxies, including our own, swirl around a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ultramassive-black-hole-33-billion-times-bigger-than-sun-durham-2023-3">supermassive</a> black hole. Matter tumbles into these black holes, which have a center so dense that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-image-helps-confirm-einsteins-predictions-2022-5">gravity</a> emprisons even the light.That's why in the latest image, the black hole at the center of M87 can be seen as a bright ring of matter swirling around a dark hole.The jets, however, are created by the matter that escapes the black hole.Material swirling around a black hole needs to lose speed and energy before it can <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-warps-space-astronomers-see-light-behind-it-2021-8">fall inwards.</a> But some of the matter doesn't slow down fast enough and is redirected away from the black hole along magnetic field lines.This matter shoots outwards in the form of narrow beams, creating the jets, <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/famous-black-hole-has-jet-pushing-cosmic-speed-limit.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">per NASA. </a>These jets have incredible properties. Not only are they among the brightest objects in the galaxy,<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/famous-black-hole-has-jet-pushing-cosmic-speed-limit.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> but previous studies</a> have suggested particles in these jets can travel at near-light speed, which is around 670 million mph.<div type="image" title="An image shows an illustration of what a black hole jet might look like" height="374" width="666" msid="99817717" hostid="261"></div><h2>A big question is where these jets originate</h2>This new picture of the black hole in M87, captured by a collaboration between telescopes from the Global Millimetre VLBI Array, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the European Southern Observatory, and the Greenland Telescope, is the first to show how the jet comes connects to the ring around the black hole. Scientists had previously only been able to snap the jet or the black hole individually — an <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5?r=US&amp;IR=T">engineering feat</a> in itself — but this is the first time that they have been able to picture them together. The new picture, published in the peer-reviewed journal <a href="https://affiliate.insider.com?h=9e2c5d87c84f212937db43a263a3a9acb8538c448c60accc845e64eeda4af274&amp;postID=644a3ae716ce4f1edf0494e3&amp;site=bi&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41586-023-05843-w" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener sponsored">Nature on Wednesday</a>, connects the jets to the edge of the black hole, providing unprecedented insight. "We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes, but we still do not fully understand how this actually happens," <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/987389" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ru-Sen Lu</a>, first author on the study and an astronomer from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, said in a press release."To study this directly we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole," he said. "This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole," Kazunori Akiyama, of MIT's Haystack Observatory, who developed the imaging software used to visualize the black hole, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/apr/26/astronomers-capture-first-image-of-jet-being-launched-from-edge-of-black-hole" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told The Guardian.</a>"Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated, and many other mysteries around the black hole, more deeply."

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