Space & Astronomy

A trail of starlight thought to possibly indicate a runaway supermassive black hole may be something much more mundane: a spiral galaxy seen edge on, a new study finds.

In February, astronomer Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and colleagues reported spotting a line of stars near a compact galaxy in Hubble Space Telescope images. The researchers’ analysis suggested that three galaxies had interacted and merged, kicking a supermassive black hole out of its host galaxy (SN: 3/10/23). The black hole then traveled through a nearby gas cloud, the scenario goes, triggering the formation of stars in a line that points toward the home galaxy and revealing the black hole’s madcap escape.

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But other researchers have been skeptical of this interpretation, with some suggesting that the scenario is too complex to explain the linear feature. In the new study, “we decided to explore what we thought was the most simple explanation,” says astronomer Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain.

He was inspired by a data plot in the original study, which compared the velocities of the stars in the linear feature with their positions, a comparison known as a velocity curve. To him, it looked like a spiral galaxy’s plot of its pinwheel rotation, where the stars in the galactic disk all move at nearly the same speed, no matter if they appeared to travel toward or away from Earth (SN: 8/17/21). That, combined with van Dokkum and colleagues’ estimate of the feature’s mass — roughly 100 million suns, which was surprisingly large for a simple line of stars — implied that the object is actually a spiral galaxy viewed on its edge, Trujillo says.

So he and his colleagues compared characteristics of the linear feature with those of a well-studied spiral galaxy called IC 5249, which astronomers know we see edge on from Earth. The team looked at the objects’ masses, surface brightnesses and general motions of stars. The properties of the galaxy and linear feature matched closely, the researchers report in the study, which is in press in Astronomy & Astrophysics and was also submitted April 24 at arXiv.org.

For now, “the evidence is not conclusive either way,” says astrophysicist Christopher Conselice of the University of Manchester in England who studies galaxy evolution and was not involved in either study.

“A black hole being ejected from a galaxy would be really cool,” Conselice says. “But I think the simple explanation is that it’s either an edge-on galaxy, or some kind of filament or tidal debris,” left over from some previous galaxy interaction.

Van Dokkum still favors the black hole scenario, in part because of one new image. In the original Hubble images, the linear feature merely points toward a compact galaxy at its left. In a new ultraviolet image, from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, “you start to see that this feature is actually connected to the galaxy,” which strengthens the runaway black hole theory, he says.

Trujillo and his colleagues suggest that the edge-on spiral galaxy and compact galaxy are independent structures but members of the same galaxy group, coincidentally close to each other from our viewpoint.

The debate’s resolution may have to wait at least until this summer when better imagery from Hubble arrives. More

A dusty belch is all that remains of a planet that was gobbled up by a star about 12,000 light-years away. It marks the first time anyone has seen a star in the act of eating a planet.

A brief burst of light captured by a couple of telescopes was probably caused by a planet about 10 times the mass of Jupiter being swallowed by its sun, researchers report May 3 in Nature. It’s a dramatic end that is the eventual destiny of many planets, including Earth.

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“Planetary engulfment has been predicted for a very long time, but their frequency was not well known,” says MIT astrophysicist Kishalay De. “So it was certainly exciting to realize we had found one.”

The discovery came about as De was on the hunt for binary stars. He was using data from the Palomar Observatory in California to look for spots in the sky that showed rapid increases in brightness. Such fluctuations can be a sign of stars coming close enough together that one will suck matter from the other (SN: 2/6/14).

One event from 2020 stood out. A spot of light rapidly got about 100 times as bright as it had been. It could have been the result of two stars merging. But a second look by NASA’s NEOWISE infrared space telescope suggested otherwise. Data from that observatory showed that the total amount of energy released in the flash was just one-thousandth what it would have been if two stars had merged, and that chilly dust surrounded the mash-up instead of hot plasma that would normally indicate a merger among stars.

The low energy suggested that one of the objects, assuming it was a merger of some kind, wasn’t a star at all. Instead, it was probably a giant planet. As the star noshed on the planet, a stream of cold dust sailed away like cosmic breadcrumbs from a stellar snack. “I was indeed surprised when we connected the dots together,” De says.

Planet-devouring stars are probably relatively common in the universe, says UCLA astrophysicist Smadar Naoz, who was not involved with the study. But the evidence, she says, has been circumstantial. Until now, astronomers have seen only signs of stars preparing for a planetary snack or debris left over from a presumed stellar meal.

“One of the things that I found in the paper that I really liked was the detective work” that pieced together evidence from multiple telescopes to confirm that the star expanded outward to eat a planet, Naoz says.

Naoz has pondered the ways that stars might gobble up planets. A star in the prime of life might consume a planet that wanders too close by in its orbit — think of that as a stellar lunch, Naoz says. A dying star, on the other hand, will swallow a planet as the star swells to become a red giant (SN: 4/7/20). That’s more like a cosmic dinner.

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The planet-eating star in this study is turning into a red giant, but is still early in its transformation.  “I would say it’s early supper,” Naoz says.

There’s a lot that’s still mysterious about stars munching on planets, De says. But upcoming observatories with large infrared cameras, he says, should let astronomers look for bright, long-lived infrared emissiosn that might reveal more planet-eating stars.

Our sun will evolve into a red giant and consume the Earth in about 5 billion years. “Because the Earth is much smaller than Jupiter,” De says, “the effects will certainly be more subdued … so finding Earth-like engulfments will be challenging, but we are actively working on ideas to identify them.” More

A long, cold stream of gas is feeding a very distant galaxy like a vast bendy straw. The finding suggests a new way for galaxies to grow in the early universe, researchers report in the March 31 Science.

Computer simulations predicted that streams of gas should connect galaxies to the cosmic web (SN: 3/6/23). But astronomers expected that gas to be warm, making it unsuitable for star-forming fuel and galaxy growth.

So astronomer Bjorn Emonts and his colleagues were surprised to see a stream of cold, star-forming gas leading into the Anthill Galaxy, a massive galaxy whose light takes 12 billion years to reach Earth.

The team spotted the stream while mapping cold gas in the galaxy’s neighborhood using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile. Emonts was particularly interested in radio wavelengths of light that carbon atoms emit when the temperature is between about -260° and -160° Celsius.

“People didn’t think that these streams could get so cold,” says Emonts, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va.

But there, in the data, a frigid stream stretched at least 325,000 light-years away from the galaxy. The stream carries the mass of 70 billion suns and deposits the equivalent of about 450 suns in cold gas onto the galaxy every year, the team calculated. That’s enough to double the galaxy’s mass within a billion years.

Emonts thinks that no one had seen such a stream before because his team used ALMA in an unusual configuration, with its telescopes arranged as close together as possible. That gave the observatory lower resolution, but a wider field of view.

“People don’t normally do that,” Emonts says. “We basically defocused ALMA to the worst possible extent.”

If other galaxies are fed by similar structures, it could mean that early galaxies grew mostly by drinking directly from the cosmic streams, rather than by the leading hypothesis — violent galaxy mergers (SN: 6/28/19). More