Mystery solved: astronomers have solved the mystery of the supermassive supermassive black hole

For many years, the astronomical community discussed A A rare note by NASA telescope.

Now, a study by a team of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) shows that star structure Unusually thin, he recently discovered it Hubble Space Telescopeit could be A galaxy on the edge, not a runaway black hole.

Is this a mysterious trail of stars formed before that 8 billion years Recently discovered by the Noble Telescope, which has been in space for more than 30 years, it has been a challenge for different research groups. Its size is similar to that of the Milky Way, and this long and narrow structure has led to different explanations for its origin.

According to one controversial initial hypothesis, This path of stars could be the result of a passage Giant black hole through a A huge cloud of gas. This idea quickly fired the imagination of the astronomical community, as it would require a large set of exceptionally complex circumstances.

For this reason, many science teams have persisted Explore different scenarios And no less strangeness can explain these observations made by the legendary NASA space telescope.

But a recent study published in the specialized magazine Astronomy and astrophysicsthe IAC researchers concluded that this unusual stellar structure could be explained as a galaxy without the appearance of an edge-on bulge. Galaxies of this type are also called Thin or flat galaxiesIt is relatively common.

This finding contradicts the original explanation that it was a runaway supermassive black hole, leaving a trail of stars in its wake.

The astronomer explained: “The movements of the stars, their size and number are consistent with what was seen in galaxies within the local universe.” Jorge Sanchez Almeida, IAC researcher and first author of the article. “It is with great satisfaction that I find a solution to this mystery, The new proposed scenario is much simpler. It’s also somewhat unfortunate, because runaway black holes are expected to exist, and that would have been the first to be noticed.”

To support the interpretation hypothesis in galactic terms, the team compared Mysterious structure with a known local galaxy Without a bulge, IC5249, which has a similar mass of stars, found surprising agreement.

vitality arrived Miria Montes, IAC researcher and co-author of the article, “When we analyzed the velocities of this distant stellar structure, we realized they were very similar to those obtained from the rotation of galaxies, so we decided to compare a much larger galaxy.” And I discovered that they are remarkably similar.

“We also look at the relationship between the putative galaxy mass And its maximum rotational speed, and we discovered that it is indeed a galaxy that behaves like a galaxy,” said Ignacio Trujillo, a researcher at IAC who was involved in the study. “It is an interesting thing, because it is a relatively large galaxy at a very great distance from Earth, where most galaxies are smaller.”

Read on: