The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a “200,000 light-year-long trail of newborn stars” that may have been left behind by a runaway supermassive black hole. Video Credit: Black Hole Animation NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman Image of Chandra X-Ray Observatory NASA/CXC and J. Vaughan 3 Black Hole Orbits and Slingshots Image from paper “A candidate runaway supermassive black hole identified by shocks and star formation in its wake” by PI Pieter Von Dokkum et al. Schematic illustration of the runaway SMBH scenario as an explanation of the key observed features. Panels 1–5 show a “classical” slingshot scenario (e.g., Saslaw et al. 1974). The background of panel 6 is a frame from an Illustris TNG simulation (Pillepich et al. 2018) Music Credit: “Unclaimed Space” by Peter Nickalls [PRS] via Atmosphere Music Ltd. [PRS] and Universal Production Music.
