Posted on 05/05/2023 1:13:31 PM PDT by Red Badger
A trail of starlight thought to possibly indicate a runaway supermassive black hole may be something much more mundane: a spiral galaxy seen edge on, a new study finds.
In February, astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and colleagues reported spotting a line of stars near a compact galaxy in Hubble Space Telescope images. The researchers’ analysis suggested that three galaxies had interacted and merged, kicking a supermassive black hole out of its host galaxy (SN: 3/10/23). The black hole then traveled through a nearby gas cloud, the scenario goes, triggering the formation of stars in a line that points toward the home galaxy and revealing the black hole’s madcap escape.
But other researchers have been skeptical of this interpretation, with some suggesting that the scenario is too complex to explain the linear feature. In the new study, “we decided to explore what we thought was the most simple explanation,” says astronomer Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain.
He was inspired by a data plot in the original study, which compared the velocities of the stars in the linear feature with their positions, a comparison known as a velocity curve. To him, it looked like a spiral galaxy’s plot of its pinwheel rotation, where the stars in the galactic disk all move at nearly the same speed, no matter if they appeared to travel toward or away from Earth (SN: 8/17/21). That, combined with van Dokkum and colleagues’ estimate of the feature’s mass — roughly 100 million suns, which was surprisingly large for a simple line of stars — implied that the object is actually a spiral galaxy viewed on its edge, Trujillo says.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Fleeing Black Hole Ping!.....................
In the last few years I believe less and less of what ‘science’ says.
Is it headed straight for Uranus?
Oops, wrong thread.
So the black hole was not fleeing from a racist galaxy after all?
It’s the scientists that are the problem, not so much science itself.
Looks like an edge-on galaxy to me…
touché
That’s what I want.
A galaxy that looks like a black hole when the tax appraiser comes to look at it.
I knew that...😏
It’s Racist MEGA-MAGA Climate Change.
Made by Republicans.
There are spots I lose connection on my cell phone yet I’m supposed to believe we have the tech to see millions of miles into space and having images sent back
They will spot every new planet and star and tax you accordingly, no matter what.
Our local Tax Appraiser now uses DRONES to access property when they couldn’t get past a locked gate............................
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