Last month’s announcement of a “invisible monster on the loose” excited scientists.
However, the first image of a ‘runaway’ supermassive black hole barreling through the universe has been challenged.
A recent analysis suggests that the Hubble Space Telescope’s trail of stars is a flat or thin galaxy.
This disproves the hypothesis that stars emerge in the aftermath of a massive black hole plowing through gas.
Yale University researchers believed the runaway object fled after two galaxies collided 50 million years ago, combining their supermassive black holes.
A third galaxy containing a black hole mingled the three, creating a “chaotic and unstable configuration.”
One black hole may have stolen momentum from the other two and left its home galaxy.
According to physicists, the two surviving black holes rocketed off in the opposite direction from the runaway black hole.
The one detected was 7.5 billion light-years away and traveling so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could traverse the 237,674 miles from Earth to the moon in 14 minutes.
The cosmic monster was literally leaving a trail of stars, according to Yale researchers.
Analysis found that these stars weighted 20 million stars and extended 200,000 light-years—twice the Milky Way’s diameter.
However, runaway black holes require many complex extraordinary circumstances to emerge.
Because of this, scientists worldwide began investigating simpler explanations to explain Hubble’s findings.
The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the Canary Islands concluded that this odd star structure may represent a galaxy without a bulge seen edge-on.
Thin or flat galaxies are common across the universe.
Spiral and lenticular galaxies feature a narrow, spinning disk of gas, dust, and stars at their center.
‘The movements, size, and amount of stars matched what has been found in galaxies inside the local universe,’ stated lead author Jorge Sanchez Almeida.
It’s a comfort to solve this riddle; the new scenario is easier.
‘In one way it is also a tragedy, because fleeing black holes are predicted, and this may have been the first one spotted.’
The researchers compared the trail of stars and their tight structure to IC5249, a well-known nearby galaxy lacking a bulge.
This exceedingly narrow galaxy, which has a similar mass of stars to what Hubble discovered, also matched the sighting in other aspects.
‘When we evaluated the velocities of this distant structure of stars, we recognized that they were quite similar to those acquired from the rotation of galaxies, so we chose to compare a much closer galaxy, and found that they are amazingly comparable,’ said research co-author Mireia Montes.
Ignacio Trujillo, another researcher, added: ‘We also looked at the link between the imagined galaxy’s mass and its maximum velocity of rotation, and determined that indeed it is a galaxy that acts like a galaxy.
It’s intriguing since it’s a huge galaxy far from Earth, where most galaxies are smaller.
Despite the new proposal, Yale researchers want to utilize NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to analyze the structure and validate their notion.