Giant black holes
Astronomers Plan to Capture Image of Black Hole NASA

An international team of astronomers and researchers discovered mysterious donut-shaped clouds close to some gigantic black holes in the Milky Way; inducing speculations that they are the cosmic remains of a high-impact planetary collision.

The new study was made while researching a group of super-massive black holes. The researchers from Britain's Leicester University found that some of these black holes were obscured from view due to the presence of the mysterious dust clouds.

The researchers further suggested that such high-impact cosmic collisions occur at speeds of up to 1000 kilometers/ sec.

The study has been published in the recent edition of the journal of the British Royal Astronomical Society.

According to CBS News, the theory has been inspired by the so-called zodiacal dust in our own solar system, which is known to originate from collisions between objects such as asteroids and comets. These rocky objects smash into one another at colossal speeds of more than 2 million miles per hour (over 3 million kilometers per hour), continuously shattering into fragments that eventually end up as microscopic dust, the astronomers said.

We suspect that the supermassive black hole in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, expelled most of the gas that would otherwise turn into more stars and planets, Reuters quoted Sergei Nayakshin, lead author from the University of Leicester in England stating. Understanding the origin of the dust in the inner regions of galaxies would take us one step closer to solving the mystery of the supermassive black holes.