Mystery solved: Astronomers crack mystery of runaway supermassive black hole

Over the years, the astronomical community has debated a A rare observation Produced by a NASA telescope.

Now, in a study conducted by a team of researchers at the Instituto de Astrophysica de Canarias (IAC), a Star system Unusually thin, recently discovered Hubble Space TelescopeMay be An edge-on galaxy and not a runaway black hole.

Is it a mysterious path of stars that formed earlier? 8 billion years Recently discovered by a super telescope that has been in space for more than 30 years, it has been a challenge for various research teams. It is about the same size as the Milky Way, and this long and narrow structure has led to various explanations for its appearance.

According to one A controversial initial hypothesis, This trail of stars may be the result of the passing of a A supermassive black hole through a A large gas cloud. This idea quickly fired the imagination of the astronomical community because it required a large complex of exceptional circumstances.

For this reason, many scientific groups continued Explores different scenarios Less glamorous is the way these observations can be explained by the famous NASA Space Telescope.

But a recent study Published In a special issue Astronomy & AstrophysicsThe IAC researchers concluded that this unusual star structure could be interpreted as a galaxy. These types of galaxies are also called galaxies Thin or flat galaxiesThey are relatively common.

The discovery contradicts the original interpretation that it is a supermassive black hole, leaving a trail of stars in its wake.

“The motions, size and number of stars are consistent with those observed in galaxies in the local universe,” explained the astronomer. Jorge Sanchez Almeida, IAC researcher and first author of the article. “So relieved to have this mystery solved The new proposed scenario is much simpler. In a way it’s a shame, because runaway black holes are expected to exist, and may have been the first to be observed.”

To support the hypothesis of a galaxy-based interpretation, the team compared A mysterious system with a well-known local constellation Without the bulge, IC5249 has a similar mass of stars, and it finds remarkable agreement.

In the words Miria Montes, “When we analyzed the velocities of these distant star formations, we realized that they were similar to those obtained from the rotation of galaxies, so we decided to compare them to a nearby, more massive galaxy,” said the IAC researcher and co-author of the paper. and found that they were remarkably similar.

“We also look at the relationship between the mass of the putative galaxy and its maximum rotation speed, we discovered that it is indeed a galaxy that behaves like a galaxy,” said Ignacio Trujillo, an IAC researcher who participated in the study. “This is an interesting object because it is a massive galaxy at a great distance from Earth, where most galaxies are small. ” he concluded.

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