Emily Chan
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a jet of flaming plasma streaming from a supermassive black hole that seems to be causing nearby stars to explode.
The trail is 3,000-light-year-long, and the black hole it’s coming from has a mass 6.5 billion times bigger than the sun in the center of galaxy M87.
The super-hot beam of energy decimates anything caught in its path. Even being in the general vicinity is a danger because the blazing jet appears to make nearby star systems called novas erupt. It is unclear why this is happening exactly.
“We don’t know what’s going on, but it’s just a very exciting find,” said Alec Lessing, the lead author of the study and an astrophysicist at Stanford University. “This means there’s something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings.”
Supermassive black holes are usually located in the centers of galaxies. They suck in matter that drifts too close and spits it back out at extreme speeds.
When material approaches a black hole, friction causes it to heat up and produce light that is trillions of times brighter than the brightest stars that telescopes can detect.
Sometimes, active black holes will channel this matter into huge jets of energy that stretch through space. Some even span entire galaxies. However, the mechanisms behind the jets are relatively unknown.
With the Hubble, researchers observed twice as many novas exploding in star systems near the jet than in the broader galaxy.
After a white dwarf siphons hydrogen from its normal star partner, novas will typically occur in their binary star systems. As a result, the white dwarf will explode like a bomb. The black hole jet seems to be causing the same thing to happen to the nova systems.
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