Astronomers think they have discovered a supermassive black hole traveling away from its home galaxy at 4 million mph — so fast it's not doing what it's notorious for: sucking light out of the universe. Quite the opposite, possibly. Rather than ripping stars to shreds and swallowing up every morsel, this black hole is believed to be fostering new star formation, leaving a trail of newborn stars stretching 200,000 light-years through space . Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomy professor at Yale University, said as the black hole rams into gas, it seems to trigger a narrow corridor of new stars, where the gas has a chance to cool. How exactly it works, though, isn't known, said van Dokkum, who led research on the phenomenon captured by NASA 's Hubble Space Telescope accidentally. A paper on the findings was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters . “What we’re seeing is the aftermath," he said in a statement . "Like the wake behind a ship, we’r...
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