A dormant supermassive black hole, therefore completely invisible, has probably been captured by telescopes in the midst of the 'escape' from its galaxy: the decisive proof, the so-called 'smoking gun', would be the trail of newborn stars that the object is leaving behind, generated by the superheated intergalactic gas due to the passage of the black hole.
This was stated by a group of researchers led by the US University of Yale in the study being published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and
available
on the arXiv platform.
The 'fugitive' is located at a distance of 7.5 billion light years and has been traveling through space at a speed of 1,600 kilometers per second for about 39 million years.
The possibility that a black hole could be ejected from its own galaxy is not so strange: astronomers have already identified several cases of this type.
What would make this discovery unique, if confirmed, is that in this case it is an inactive black hole, therefore there is not that enormous amount of matter falling inside it which would make it easily recognizable.
The researchers led by Pieter Van Dokkum, in fact, became aware of the presence of a mysterious object by chance, while studying the images of a much closer dwarf galaxy photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency (ESA), which revealed the presence of the bright trail of forming stars.
According to the authors of the study, everything could have started from the merger of two galaxies, which led to two black holes rotating around each other.
A third galaxy with its black hole would then have intervened to disturb the peace achieved, which caused the expulsion of one of the three objects.
Further observations will be needed to confirm the presence of the black hole and to look for other similar examples, discovered thanks to the same technique.
