Circumgalactic Black hole imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope

[pinball1970]

TL;DR Summary

A "wandering" black hole thought to be the result of two merging galaxies.

From NASA:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddar...-runaway-black-hole-creating-a-trail-of-stars

"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 in New Haven, Connecticut. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to."

The milky way is 100,000 light years across, this object it twice that distance.

A Black hole facilitating the formation of new stars. The paper here :
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acba86

 

[FactChecker]

Interesting. As a casual amateur, it's my understanding that a black hole in a galaxy is really a small part, by any measure, of a galaxy. Is that true in general and in this case?

"What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to."

The milky way is 100,000 light years across, this object it twice that distance.

I guess that is talking about the size of the entire thing, including the trailing stars. I wonder how the diameter is defined in such a long, drawn-out formation.