James Webb telescope confirms a supermassive black hole running away from its host galaxy at 2 million mph, researchers say

This illustration shows a black field speckled with white, yellow and red galaxies. A black hole, near the left, bottom corner of the image, plows through space, leaving a diagonal trail of newborn stars stretching back to the black hole's parent galaxy.

A shock wave, far away in space, might be the telltale sign of the first confirmed "runaway" supermassive black hole, escaping its host galaxy at 2.2 million miles per hour (3.6 million km/h).

The potential confirmation by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), published on the preprint server Arxiv on Dec. 3, has not yet been peer-reviewed. But it has been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and lead study author Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, has published several peer-reviewed papers about candidate supermassive black holes in recent years.