The cosmic collision creates black holes on unmanned land between galaxies

In a discovery challenging all the knowledge that astronomers think of astronomers’ knowledge of black hole formation, researchers have discovered a supermassive black hole floating in space between two collision galaxies, a cosmic orphan that may have been born from the violent crash itself.

This weird system, known as the appearance of the “Infinite” Milky Way, occupies 7 billion light-years and has a black hole with quasar power output. But unlike a typical supermass black hole, anchoring itself in the center of the galaxy, the middle ground between two huge stellar nuclei, each of which is surrounded by a unique ring of the star.

“It’s as close to the smoking gun as we might get,” said Pieter Van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale and lead author at Yale University. “This is as close to the smoking gun as we might get,” said Pieter Van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale University. The discovery of data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope as part of the Cosmos-Web survey.

A black hole without home

It is unusual to find a super-large black hole outside the galaxy nucleus. It was found that what was recently formed was unprecedented. Van Dokkum and his team used follow-up observations from the Keck Observatory, along with very large arrays and X-ray measurements of radio data from the Chandra Observatory to piece together the cosmic crime scene.

The location of the black hole tells a fascinating story. Radio emissions indicate their location with significant accuracy, not in either of the two galactic nuclei, but suspended in an ionized gas cloud between them, stretching 10 kilometers between them. The gas itself emits light with obvious characteristics of extreme conditions, emitting light at a width of 400 to 2000 Angstroms.

Van Dokkum’s team suggested that the two disk galaxies collided about 50 million years ago. During the cosmic shattering process, the gas clouds are compressed and shocked at the collision sites, for example, what happens in collisions such as galaxy groups such as famous bullet groups (such as famous bullet groups), but at a smaller scale.

The birth of a monster

Collision theory solves the long-term problems of astrophysics. Weber’s telescope observations reveal supermassive black holes in the early universe that were too large to grow from stellar residues in available time. This led scientists to propose the formation of “heavy seeds”, where large gas clouds collapse directly into black holes without forming stars first.

Infinite galaxies may prove this process. The main observations support the assumption of direct crash:

• Black holes weigh about 1 million solar energy and radiate near their theoretical maximum efficiency
• Its radio emissions show steep spectrum signatures, consistent with a young, recently activated black hole
• The surrounding gases show extreme equivalent widths, which indicates that ordinary starlight has minimal pollution
• The speed of a black hole matches the midpoint between two degraded galaxy nuclei

X-ray luminosity alone can reach 1.5×10^44 ERG, and although the black hole has a relatively small mass, it still reaches the quasar level. Combined with powerful radio emissions, these signatures point to the recently ignited engines, rather than the ancient wanderers.

Cosmic evidence

The team’s detectives work beyond the black hole itself. By measuring the velocity of gas in the ring of stars and taking into account the direction of the system, they estimate the separation of galaxies to be 260 kilometers per second. This suggests that the collision occurred about 50 million years ago, which was enough for black holes to grow from the initial 300,000 solar seeds.

Priyamvada Natarajan, a co-author of Yale University, is a co-author who has long advocated the heavy seed theory and sees the discovery as a validation of extreme stratigraphic scenarios. The conditions that created this black hole—as the galaxy collision compressed the frenzy, metal-rich gas—when the first supermass black hole formed, it was believed that the chaotic environment was believed to exist in the early universe.

The study also hints at additional complexity. Both galaxy nuclei may carry their own supermassive black holes, potentially making it a triple black hole system. Each core contains approximately 100 billion solar-powered stars compressed into areas less than 1,000, which is typical for density even by Milky Way standards.

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Van Dokkum stressed the need for additional observations to confirm the discovery. Future James Webb space telescope spectra can map gas dynamics in detail and look for velocity characteristics that can distinguish in situ strata from trapped lingering black holes.

The discovery opens a window for extreme physics that might be common in the early universe. If confirmed by simulation and follow-up observations, the Infinity Milky Way will provide the first direct evidence that supermassive black holes can be formed by collapse of gravity under the correct conditions.

As Van Dokkum pointed out, everything about the galaxy system violated expectations. The symmetrical bicyclic morphology resembles the nearby Galaxy II Hz 4, but the central black hole transforms it from an interesting collision residue into a laboratory to test the fundamental theory about the largest object in the universe.

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