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| A spiral Galaxy with orange and glowing blue center / photo /NASA. |
Astronomers have observed a gigantic cosmic "contrail" in a distant galaxy. The trail of gas and dust may have been churned out by a passing massive black hole.The contrail was spotted in the spiral galaxy NGC 3627, located roughly 31 million light-years from our solar system in the constellation Leo.
"Although contrails have been previously identified in the Milky Way, NGC 3627's is the most clearly defined contrail ever discovered and is remarkable for its sheer size," study co-author Mengke Zhao said.
The contrail is roughly 20,000 light-years long — about one-fifth the diameter of our entire galaxy — and extremely narrow, at only 650 light-years wide
Zhao and co-author Guang-Xing Li stumbled upon the galactic contrail when analyzing data collected by the Physics at High Angular Resolution of Nearby Galaxies (PHANGS) survey.
Using a range of telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, this survey aims to study how gas and star formation influences, and is influenced by, galaxy structure and evolution. While the PHANGS-JWST data revealed that NGC 3627's contrail contains dust particles, the PHANGS-ALMA data suggested it was also rich in carbon monoxide.
The model shows that as the object flew through the galactic disk, it squeezed out the gas, leaving behind the contrail marking its passage. The tremendous turbulence within NGC 3627's contrail supports this model.
The contrail's features allowed the researchers to estimate that the compact object was about 10 million solar masses and was zipping past at a breakneck speed of 186 miles per second (300 kilometers per second) — 50% faster than the current speed record for a spacecraft, held by the Parker Solar Probe.
Additional calculations indicate the contrail formed 20 million years ago, relatively recently in astronomical terms. (The Milky Way is more than 13 billion years old. The research could enhance more demonstration and studies through that galaxy that may have important features through for our lives .