NASA announcing new scientific discoveries or observations in space is usually something exciting, fascinating, and often beautiful. The creations of the universe are nothing short of stunning, in every sense of the word, and knowing there's still more out there to learn about is cause for celebration every day.
That being said, sometimes these discoveries can be all of those wonderful things as well as frightening, existential, and unknown. NASA's recent discovery of a new black hole is just that.
Now more than ever the sky seems to be beckoning us to take action. So why wait any longer? Is now the time to turn your dreams into reality and take that leap of faith?
Click this link for a free astrological reading to take that first step toward making your passions a reality. With the right guidance, and with a little help from the stars, you can unlock a whole new world of opportunity!
The vast, unexplored edges of space contain nothing but mystery. We have no knowledge of what's out there or even what could be out there, as anything is possible in realms where human understanding of the world's functions doesn't apply. That's why, even today, brand-new things we've never seen throughout the whole of the observable universe can still be discovered.
And, sometimes, those new discoveries can be rather frightening, like what NASA warned about not long ago.
NASA has confirmed the presence of a 'runaway' black hole in our universe.
"There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes," reads the first line of the press release detailing the discovery.
They dub it a supermassive black hole that weighs as much as 20 million suns. It has left behind a "never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long 'contrail' of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy."
Rather than eating starts that wind up in front of it—which is typically what black holes do—instead, it's driving itself into the gas surrounding the stars, creating new stars in its wake.
The reason why it's not swallowing anything up is that it's moving too fast to do so.
NASA has never seen anything like this before, and in fact, they found this one by complete accident via the Hubble Space Telescope.
"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole."
"Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known."
The team is in awe that they managed to find this incredible, brand-new phenomenon by complete accident.
"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum said. He was apparently looking for something else entirely, a globular star cluster in a nearby dwarf galaxy, when he made the discovery. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."
After further research, NASA believes this stunning phenomenon was created by multiple other supermassive black holes colliding with one another, with astronomers believing the first crash was about 50 million years ago. This caused the two black holes to begin swirling around one another in each other's orbit.
Then, a third black hole came along, crashed into the first two, and created such momentum that they fired off in opposite directions at an unprecedented speed. This new trail of stars NASA found resulted from that black hole still traveling just as quickly millions of years later.
This black hole poses no threat to us as of yet, despite it's remarkable speed. It appears to be too far from our galaxy to worry about, but with NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope that plans to view a wide-angle shot of the universe at the same quality of the Hubble telescope, who knows what we could find?
This is likely not the only star streak caused by a speeding black hole that exists out there. After all, we still don't know what happened to the other side of that black hole collision. Could the direction it shot off in be a perfect trajectory toward our own Milky Way?
With the universe seemingly offering us no answers, the best we can do is look to ourselves for guidance. Take that first leap of faith, and unlock the potential for success that you've been searching for all this time.
Click this link for a free astrological reading to take that first step toward making your passions a reality. With the right guidance, and with a little help from the stars, you can unlock a whole new world of opportunity!
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