An unusual “rogue” black hole is on the run! Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, the Hubble Space Telescope Senior Project Science Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, joins Dean Regas to discuss this mysterious finding. Music used in this episode is by Ziv Moran, BENJA, Diamonds and Ice, Nobou, and Tamuz Dekel. New episodes of Looking Up release every other Friday!
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- NASA warns of supermassive black hole RIPPING through the universe
- Hubble Catches Possible Runaway Black Hole
- Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars
- 'Runaway black hole,' or sneaky galaxy in disguise? Experts are conflicted.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: [00:00:00] There's a black hole running wild through intergalactic space. It has the mass of 20 million suns and is traveling so fast. It could go all the way from earth to the moon in just 14 minutes. But we usually only find super massive black holes like these in the center of galaxies. So what is this thing doing out in open space and how did we discover this rogue black hole in the first.
place. Today we're joined by a lead scientist for the Hubble Telescope. To find out more about this mysterious discovery from the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio. I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is a looking up
the show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about. [00:01:00] What makes this amazing universe of ours so great. So this is always exciting talking about black holes. They're this mysterious object that are known a little bit, but. There's a lot of unknowns to black holes.
There are actual objects in space that we have been discovering more and more recently, and this one really is strange.
(News Clip): NASA has said there is an invisible monster on the loose. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.
Dean Regas: This is discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope, partially by accident.
Astronomers are looking at this, this old. Picture and they found this small streak of light, a, a, a stream of light that's 200,000 light years long, and stars that are seemingly coming out of nowhere, but seems to be really a black hole. And so most black holes we find are associated with [00:02:00] galaxies. So they're either in the center of galaxies or they're inside the galaxy.
Like if you think of like the Milky Way with its pinwheel shape and spiral arms, there's usually somewhere in there, but. This one seems to be outside of a galaxy. It's actually racing through the universe. It then garners the cool, renegade name of rogue, a black hole. I love it. I wish I was a rogue of something.
But anyway, what's going on with this black hole? Well, man, I can't wait to find out. Today we're joined by a lead scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope to find out more about this mysterious black hole, our guest this week is Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, the Hubble Space Telescope Senior Project Science Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Well, Dr. Wiseman, thanks so much for joining me today.
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: My pleasure.
Dean Regas: So black holes have this just amazing fascination with the public. How would you describe a black hole to, like a beginner, beginning, [00:03:00] astronomy, backyard enthusiasts, that kind of thing?
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Sure. So you're right that black holes have engaged our imagination for such a long time.
Especially in science fiction, but it's truly science fact as well, that whenever you have a lot of mass compacted into a very small volume, it's going to distort space time in an extreme way. Now, Albert Einstein helped us understand that all masks. Is actually distorting space time. You and I are distorting space just because we are massive bodies, but usually it's not enough to cause detectable effects, but when you have something like a star, something very huge that runs out of fuel and, and the core of it collapses into some time, Tiny volume, then you've got a lot of [00:04:00] mass in a real small volume, and that can create a large distortion of space time with very strong gravitational attraction.
And of course, if you've got in the middle of a galaxy, a lot of these. Old dead stars eventually migrating to the core of that galaxy and being pulled together by gravity, you're gonna have a lot of mass, sometimes millions or even billions of times. The mass of our sun compressed into a very small volume that creates an enormous gravitational field, an enormous distortion of space time, and so within a certain radius of any size of a black hole, the light cannot get in because it just, Crosses through the lines of this distorted space time and can't get out.
We have a lot of of imaginations about what it would be like if you got too close to a black hole and got, you know, pulled in and all kinds of things like that. [00:05:00] But they are certainly mysterious and interesting features of our universe.
Dean Regas: Well, I think it really does like, resonate with the public so much. Like I get so many questions about black holes all the time, and tell us more about this new discovery and maybe what it is and maybe what it isn't.
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Sure. So, so this is kind of a, a cool detection from the Hubble Space Telescope. It, it was unexpected actually, but a team of, of scientists led by Pieter van Dokkum found this galaxy, actually, it looks like a merging pair of galaxies, but in this vicinity, they saw a long streak of stars.
They actually saw a streak, which they didn't know what that was. Never before seeing 200,000 light, year long trail of newborn stars. And then at the tip of it, this bright kind of shocked globule. And they could tell by looking at this, that this really seemed to be [00:06:00] something unusual. It seemed to be something I.
Moving at a supersonic speed away from the galaxies and shocking this gas that's kind of wispy between galaxies. And they did some modeling and realized that what was probably happening, at least in their interpretation, is. That as these two or three galaxies were starting to merge together, you know they do a little dance because they've got some relative motion to each other and rotation, and as bodies gravitationally interact, they can actually.
Kick out some, some of the, the mass and it looked like the super massive black hole from within one of these galaxies that were interacting got ejected. And as this super massive black hole was ejected way out of its host galaxy, it [00:07:00] created this stream of star formation behind it. So this is pretty cool, but the computer model seemed to verify that this could in fact be the case.
Dean Regas: Well, and so this has been looked at by a lot of people and there seems to be an alternate theory that this may be a black hole, but it may be something else. What do you think of that?
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Yeah, so this is just what I call really cool science drama. So we have another group. That has looked at the same data, the same images, and they say, you know, I think that actually this could be instead of a long stream of stars coming out of this galaxy, That this could actually be another galaxy that we're just seeing edge on.[00:08:00]
You know, galaxies or at least spiral galaxies are sort of like flat pancakes, and within the pancake you can have spiral arms of stars and gas and dust, but if you happen to be looking at one of these galaxies, From the side where it's edge on, it would look, you know, like a linear streak. And this group led by Dr. Jorge Almeida and his team, from their models and looking at the motions of the stars, this streak of stars, they felt like maybe we could actually be seeing a galaxy just from the side. And so that would be, you know, a little less exciting. It would just be kind of a happenstance, juxtaposition of this edge on galaxy next to this interacting doublet or triplet of galaxies next to it.
And yet, you know, perhaps much more likely because we see lots and lots of galaxies in different orientations. And this would be the first time that we'd seen a runaway black hole [00:09:00] creating a streak of stars forming behind it. Now the original team, however does not agree with this interpretation because they've done observations with, with other telescopes that seem to confirm what they've interpreted from the Hubble Space Telescope observation because they see a, an actual visual connection between that.
Long stream of stars and the actual galaxies out, out of which they think this black hole has been ejected. They see a clear bridge. There's gonna be some more observations of this region to be sure. So this is exciting science, drama, and and I, I love it. We're right in the midst of it right now.
Dean Regas: Oh, I love it too. Science drama. Tune in for the next exciting episode. Now, there's one other thing that I, I hesitate to mention, but it, I think a lot of people do think about this. Is there any worry of a black hole coming at us? Do we have any, you know, there's this [00:10:00] kind of overarching "cosmophobia" I like to call it. And can you can you help reassure everybody that black holes will not end us here?
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Hmm. I think I think black holes are cool, but as far as you know, we know there's no black hole that's headed right our way. In fact, there should be this may, this may creep you out, but there should be a lot, a lot of the smaller black holes filling the galaxy because we believe that larger stars stars bigger than our sun.
When they run out of fuel, they sometimes, you know, have a very spectacular death through a supernova explosion. But what's left, the leftover material in the core of the star that can't support itself anymore, that collapses into this, you know, really dense volume and that can create a, a small black hole.
You know, that's just the, the mass of, of the leftovers of, of, of a [00:11:00] star. And so we think that the, the more massive stars don't last very long. And so our galaxy should be, you know, pretty full of these dead stellar remnants from the bigger stars that have come and gone. And the only way we can detect them since we can't see them, is if they happen to pass in front of a background star or a background galaxy.
And the light from that background, star galaxy comes. You know right next to that black hole, so it doesn't actually get pulled in, but it gets distorted a little bit so we can see some of these gravitational lensing effects. And so we know that these little black holes are, are around in the galaxy. But you know, they're just kind in a sense, think of them like other stars.
We just can't see them and it's very unlikely that would, we would be on a, a head-on collision path with one of these dead stars. So as far as the stellar mass black [00:12:00] holes, they should be all over the galaxy. Hard to see or hard to detect, but nothing to worry about. And then as far as the super massive black holes, these can be really powerful, but, We're not close to other galaxies where this is going on.
And even in our own Milky Way, we do believe there is a super massive black hole in its core. We can tell that by the fast motions of stars orbiting right around the core of our galaxy, but we're not close to the center of our galaxy either. So we're not about to fall into that super massive black hole.
So I think we can rest assured that as far as we know, we're pretty safe. From being pulled into a black hole, but hopefully we'll be finding more and more ways of detecting them, which I think is gonna be pretty cool.
Dean Regas: Oh yeah. Watching these from a safe distance is always good. And I do have to point out that when astronomers say unlikely, they have a different view of what unlikely means compared to the general public. I, [00:13:00] I always like that, you know, it's unlikely this is gonna hit us, you know, like, One in 10 trillion. Yeah, that's unlikely to an astronomer. So I don't know if you reassured the public much, but I did like the you know, the, the, the statistics there. I think that's good. Well thanks so much, Jennifer, for talking with us about this.
This is a fascinating story. We're gonna be paying attention to the space drama that's happening about this, and it must be a lot of fun to be part of.
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Oh it is. And, and I'll, I'll let you know that we, we have many different eyes on the sky right now, so we'll certainly be following up looking at this collection of galaxies and this possible ejected massive black hole that we've spotted with the Hubble Space Telescope Teams will be looking at that with the web space telescope.
Web and Hubble are complimentary space telescopes. They see different kinds of light, so that gives us different kinds of information. So we're so glad we have both the Hubble telescope and the, the, the newer web telescope operating right now, as well as other [00:14:00] telescopes in space like the Chandra X-Ray observatory and a lot of really, Wonderful professional telescopes of different kinds on the ground, whether we're studying galaxies and black holes, or whether we're looking at our own solar system and, and, and stars nearby. So so it's a good time for astronomy and, and these new discoveries keep us focused on the sky.
Dean Regas: Well, this has been awesome talking with you. Thanks so much. Our guest this week has been Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, the Hubble Space Telescope, Senior Project Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Thanks again for joining us today.
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: You're welcome.
Dean Regas: Looking up with Dean Rodriguez is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Marshall Verbsky is our show producer and lens flare specialist. Yeah, he can pick a lens flare out of black hole, that's for sure. And Ella Rowen is our audio engineer and Intergalactic Pioneer. So yeah, they're like far out, man. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran. I'm Dean Regas and keep looking up![00:15:00]
