The James Webb Space Telescope concluded a half-century scientific debate by providing the first irrefutable evidence for the existence of “recoiling” supermassive black holes—objects that astronomers theoretically predicted since the 1970s. An international group led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University utilized the powerful NIRSpec spectrograph to thoroughly examine the enigmatic object RBH-1, situated at a colossal distance of 7.5 billion light-years from Earth.
The discovery narrative began in 2023 with the review of archived Hubble telescope images, where researchers spotted an unusual glowing structure receding from the dwarf galaxy RCP 28. A faint luminous tail stretched an incredible 200,000 light-years—a span twice the diameter of the Milky Way. Nevertheless, only Webb’s highly sensitive instruments could definitively confirm the nature of this phenomenon and locate its origin.
Spectroscopic observations revealed that the cosmic “runaway” is a supermassive black hole possessing a mass exceeding the Sun’s by over 10 million times. This gravitational behemoth is hurtling through intergalactic space at roughly 1000 kilometers per second, leaving behind a magnificent trail of ionized gas formed over approximately 70 million years.
The physical processes occurring in the gaseous wake are astonishingly intricate. At the black hole’s leading edge, a potent bow shock wave was registered, where gas is sharply compressed and heated to extreme temperatures, inhibiting star formation. However, beyond the shock front, pressure drops abruptly, gas rapidly cools and condenses, creating a paradoxical scenario: the destructive black hole simultaneously fosters perfect conditions for the birth of new stars in its turbulent trail, reports Naked Science.
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