This gigantic black hole does not represent any danger for the Earth, because the phenomenon is distant, dating back already to half the age of the Universe.
NASA has just announced the observation by the Hubble Space Telescope of a traveling black hole. With a mass of 20 million times that of the Sun, it hits clouds of gas on its way. Then the gas turns into a trail of forming stars, 200,000 light years long.
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“What we see in space is like the wake of a ship at sea. It’s a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and can form stars,” explains Pieter van Dokkum, from Yale University. This does not represent any danger for the Earth, because the phenomenon is distant, dating back already to half the age of the Universe.
Two galaxies would have merged
This discovery, made by accident, is unprecedented. It opens a new chapter in astronomical observations. According to one explanation, two galaxies would have merged about fifty million years ago, causing the super-massive black holes at their centers to revolve around each other. A third galaxy would then collide, creating an unstable chaotic three-body system. One of the black holes would have been ejected at an enormous speed.
The one discovered by Hubble could thus go from Earth to the Moon in just fourteen minutes. Astrophysicists envision such wandering black holes in potentially large numbers. The Nancy-Grace-Roman telescope, which is scheduled to be launched during the coming decade, will notably have the task of spotting these trails of stars, signatures of the passage of wandering supersonic black holes.