Скачать или смотреть JWST Confirms First Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Tearing Through “Cosmic Owl” Galaxies

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have confirmed the first known runaway supermassive black hole, a 10‑million‑solar‑mass monster racing out of a pair of interacting galaxies nicknamed the “Cosmic Owl” at roughly 1,000 kilometers per second, or about 2.2 million miles per hour. Instead of sitting quietly in a galactic core like most supermassive black holes, this one has been violently kicked out and is now plowing through intergalactic gas, driving a powerful bow shock in front of it and leaving a narrow, 200,000‑light‑year‑long streak of glowing material in its wake where gas is compressed and collapses into newborn stars. Hubble first spotted the strange linear feature in 2023, but Webb’s NIRSpec observations have now measured how the gas is being displaced and shocked, revealing a clear dynamical signature that there is a fast‑moving black hole at the tip of the trail rather than a jet or tidal tail from a galaxy.

Models suggest the black hole was ejected during a violent interaction between at least two, and possibly three, supermassive black holes that met when their host galaxies merged; either a gravitational‑wave “kick” from a black‑hole merger or a three‑body slingshot encounter could have flung the newly formed giant out of the galactic center at escape velocity. As it streaks some 230,000 light‑years from its birthplace, the runaway offers direct evidence that supermassive black holes can be booted from their homes, reshaping their galaxies and seeding stars and heavy elements far out into intergalactic space—an extreme process theorists had long predicted but never before seen so clearly.

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