A supermassive black hole hurtling away from its galaxy at about 4 million miles per hour, so fast that it could travel from Earth to the Moon in just 14 minutes, astronomers have spotted, led by the Yale University.

Analyzing images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, researchers discovered an unusual, very thin, almost straight line of young stars.

After observations with the Keck Observatory’s Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and Near-Infrared Spectrograph they concluded that they were seeing the aftermath of a flying black hole. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The black hole has left behind an unprecedented trail of newborn stars 200,000 light-years long. “We think we’re seeing a wave behind the black hole, where the gas cools and is able to form stars. This is how we see the formation of stars following the black hole,” says Yale University Professor of Astronomy and Physics and lead author of the study, Peter Van Dokum.

As he characteristically adds: “What we see is what follows. Like the wake behind a ship, we see the wake behind the black hole.”

Peter Van Dokum notes that “we’ve never seen anything like this anywhere in the universe.” “We’ve known for a long time that supermassive black holes exist, and it was predicted for about 50 years that they could sometimes be ejected from galaxies. If confirmed, this would be the first evidence of a runaway supermassive black hole, proving this prediction.”

One possible explanation for the black hole being pulled away from its parent galaxy involves the merger of two galaxies, both of which contain a supermassive black hole at their core. As the black holes swirl around each other at the center of the newly merged galaxy, a third supermassive black hole inside another galaxy intrudes, and the interaction between the three creates enough velocity to torpedo one of the three black holes. Sort of like a galactic billiard between three massive black holes.

Next, the researchers seek to make observations with the James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm whether their discovery is, in fact, a runaway black hole.