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Curated by: Dr. Becky (610 videos)
What’s scarier than a supermassive black hole? How about a supermassive black hole on the run, ejected from the centre of its galaxy at over 3.5 million miles per hour and leaving a trail of newly formed stars in its wake? At least that’s what one research group of astrophysicists think is responsible for this faint line of light first seen in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2022. When this happens, you’ve got two main questions to answer, 1) is it real? And 2) how far away is it? So had to first confirm seen in multiple images taken at different wavelengths, or colours of light, by Hubble, to prove it was real. And not just a weird artefact caused by noise processing, or a fluke cosmic ray charged particle that’s hit the detector here. And then figure out how far away it was - because could either be in foreground, something close to stars in our own milky way galaxy, or in background, in distant universe. Turns out when you do that for this long thin streak, it's at the same distance as the galaxy in the image, around 7.8 billion light years away. And that’s where things get interesting, because if it’s that far away, then this streak is big. It’s 150,000 light years wide, making it bigger than our entire Milky Way galaxy of over 100 billion stars. So since van Dokkum and collaborators discovered this long thin streak back in 2023, it fell to them to provide the first explanation for it. And they concluded it was a runaway SMBH. But it was that conclusion that has triggered a big scientific debate. Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: martino.freelance@gmail.com Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com