A supermassive black hole moving at extremely high speeds, leaving behind a magnificent and unprecedented trail of stars, was recorded by the oldest Hubble Space Telescope, causing a great sensation in the scientific community and sparked a discussion. It is a supermassive black hole moving away from its galaxy at about 6.5 million kilometers per hour, so fast that it can get from the Earth to the Moon in just 14 minutes. This speed is characterized as “dizzying” even for the Cosmos.

“The more we observe the Universe, the more we discover new things, the more it surprises us.” says Ioannis Daglis “K”.professor of space physics at the Kapodistrian University of Athens and president of the Hellenic Space Center, commenting on the publication of an international research team in the April issue of the journal “Letters from an astrophysical journal”.

“There are a lot of very interesting elements in this discovery. First, this particular black hole is very large, up to 20 million times the mass of the Sun, while usually it is several times the mass of the Sun. The second feature is her speed, how fast she moves. As a result of this speed, instead of sucking in all the mass that is in its path, it pushes a significant part to the side. Like a boat that sails on the sea and rips up the water, collecting a lot of water from the right and left,” explains Mr. Daglis. “As a result, it crosses and collects clouds of cosmic dust, collecting mass in empty space. A local increase in mass density is the first step in star formation,” says the professor of space physics. As he notes, the course of astrogenesis passes through the creation of aggregates, concentrations of matter, the conquest of critical density, the induction of gravitational attraction, which leads to protostars, and then to stars.

200,000 light years long

The researchers, who followed up with the publication, speak of an unprecedented 200,000 light-year trail of newborn stars left by the black hole. “We think we are seeing a wave behind a black hole, where the gas cools and can form stars. This is how we see the formation of stars after a black hole,” said Peter van Dokkum, Yale University professor of astronomy and physics and lead author of the study.

“Breathtaking”

“The discovery that the motion of a large black hole causes the creation of new stars is something new,” Mr. Daglis, president of the Hellenic Space Center, tells K.

“This is a new perspective. The discovery that the movement of a large black hole causes the creation of new stars is something new. Until now, we knew that stars are born from explosions, when the “fragments” of celestial bodies are scattered in space and in the process are collected in new shape. That’s why it’s interesting if black holes are associated with new stellar creations,” says Mr. Daglis, especially since black holes are considered aging stars.

There are also speculations about exactly how this supermassive black hole acquired its extremely high speed. “Usually supermassive stars are in pairs. “There may have been a system of two black holes, and as the third black hole approached, it fired, possibly receiving additional momentum from the other two,” Mr. Daglis explains. The research team’s presentations also use the example of billiards in its space version and how a ball can be thrown over a group of balls after being hit.

A look into the past

“The universe has never ceased to amaze me. It is terrible to think that what we see today does not exist. The farther away objects are, the older we are in time. When we look at the sky, we look into the past. When we see the Sun, for example, we look back eight minutes, because that’s how long it takes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. When we see Alpha Centauri, we see what existed four years ago,” explains the president of the Hellenic Space Center.

It is also noteworthy that it was the “old” Hubble space telescope that recorded the impressive phenomenon. Hubble remains worthy of a fight, Mr. Daglis said, while noting that decision makers are also thinking about turning the James Webb toward a particular black hole. “What each telescope sees is also a matter of luck. He can look in some direction as part of the survey and suddenly fix something unexpected, ”explains Mr. Daglis. In fact, as he tells us, there is an overflow of requests in telescopes: due to the fact that there are too many Space Research Groups and proposals-requests for observations that cannot be satisfied all, there is a distribution of time in the “look” of telescopes so that they can be was to serve as much as possible!

The field of space research seems endless and complex, and the scientific knowledge of today and tomorrow is being created through breathtaking dives into the deep past through space telescope observations.

Algorithm Contribution

Impressive new images of the M87 black hole were released yesterday by an international team of scientists led by Greek astrophysicist Dimitris Psaltis at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. This is the result of reprocessing photographs and other data of the large black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, also known as Messier 87 and A Virgo, which were collected in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. The research team has used PRIMO for the first time, a new algorithm that “learns” by feeding it large amounts of material from high-quality black hole simulations. The research team, consisting of Leah Medeiros, Dimitris Psaltis, Tod R. Lauer, and Faryal Ozel, notes that by using a properly “trained” PRIMO, we can reconstruct high-quality black hole images even in the presence of sparse coverage. A spectacular image of the supermassive black hole M87 has been reconstructed by PRIMO and shows the familiar shape of black holes with a bright ring. Already in 2017, the EHT managed to capture the first direct image of the center of the galaxy M87, where there is a monstrous black hole with a diameter of 40 billion kilometers and a mass of 6.5 billion solar masses. The exceptional resolution achieved by the EHT is made possible by the many Earth-spanning telescopes whose images are combined. With the development of advanced algorithms, material recorded by telescopes can be visualized more efficiently.