By: Jason Shen

A black hole is an area of such immense gravity that nothing (even light) can escape from it. Black holes form at the end of some stars’ lives. The energy that held the star together disappears and it collapses in on itself producing a magnificent explosion.

Pieter Van Dokkum, a professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, accidentally made the discovery of a black hole leaving a trail of stars. He was looking for star clusters in NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope when he spotted this light trail. He first thought that the star trail was just a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact, but when he removed the cosmic rays, the trail was still there.

Pieter was curious where the trail was coming from so he and his team decided to investigate further. Scientists say the stars are caused by a supermassive black hole racing through the gas clouds at unbelievable speeds. If the black hole was in our solar system, the black hole would be able to travel the distance from the sun to Earth in 14 minutes (light travels this distance in 8 minutes). This is too fast for it to absorb anything in its path. Instead, it is creating a new trail of stars.