Webb Telescope Spots Compelling Clues of Black Hole Ripping Through Galaxy, Leaving Massive Trail

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NGC 3627, which was observed accompanied by a contrail, is situated 31 million light-years away in the direction of the Leo constellation. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Lee (STScI), T. Williams (Oxford), PHANGS Team)

Space experts have detected a massive cosmic “contrail” within a faraway galaxy. This trail, composed of gas and particulate matter, may have been produced by a passing supermassive black hole, although alternative explanations are plausible, as indicated by a fresh scientific paper.

The contrail was observed in the spiral galaxy identified as NGC 3627, positioned about 31 million light-years from our own solar system inside the bounds of the Leo constellation.

While contrails have previously been discerned in the Milky Way, the one in NGC 3627 stands out as the most distinctly characterized ever discovered, and is “notable for its extreme dimensions,” as stated by study co-author Mengke Zhao, a doctoral candidate specializing in astronomy at Nanjing University in China, in an email to Live Science. The contrail extends nearly 20,000 light-years — approximately a fifth of the width of our entire galaxy — while maintaining a remarkably slender form, measuring only 650 light-years in breadth.

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Zhao and her colleague Guang-Xing Li chanced upon the galactic contrail while examining information gathered via the Physics at High Angular Resolution of Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) survey. Employing an array of telescopes, notably the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) situated in Chile, this survey endeavors to analyze the mutual influences between gas, star creation, galactic structure, and evolutionary processes. The PHANGS-JWST data highlighted that NGC 3627’s contrail includes dust elements, whereas the PHANGS-ALMA data pointed toward its high concentration of carbon monoxide.

The contrail underscored in the illustration has a length of 6 kiloparsecs, which translates to 20,000 light-years — constituting one-fifth of the Milky Way galaxy’s span.

The contrail manifests as a subtle, straight line of gas and particulate matter, differing conspicuously from the galaxy’s pair of spiral arms. Grounded in a theoretical model previously established by Li in 2021, Zhao and Li posit that a bulky concentrated object, such as a black hole, was most probably responsible for its emergence. According to the model, the gas was displaced as the object traversed the galactic plane, creating the contrail that traces its trail. The extensive disturbance within NGC 3627’s contrail lends weight to this notion.

The contrail’s traits enabled the scientists to infer that the object held a mass equivalent to roughly 10 million suns, and was hurtling onward at a staggering velocity of 186 miles per second (300 kilometers per second) — an approximate 50% elevation above the existing velocity apex for any spacecraft, as held by the Parker Solar Probe. Further estimations imply the contrail took shape 20 million years prior, a somewhat recent occurrence on the astronomical timeline. (For reference, the Milky Way’s age surpasses 13 billion years).

Even though the scientists conjectured that the object might represent a supermassive black hole, they also raised the prospect of it being the compact nucleus of a dwarf galaxy.

“With the present data in hand, we cannot firmly differentiate between those two alternatives,” Zhao clarified. “The anticipated mass corresponds with either scenario. The direct identification of the object presents significant obstacles — should it be a dim dwarf galaxy, its visibility would be seriously reduced at NGC 3627’s expanse. Impending extensive optical analyses or ultra-high-resolution ALMA observations may perhaps reveal a matching celestial body.”

The scientists further proposed that enigmatic reddish and densely packed objects known as “little red dots” could be at play, though they have yet to ascertain the precise mechanics.