NASA’s Hubble Makes Wild Discovery Of Black Hole Jets That Blow-Up Stars

Astronomers using NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope made a wild discovery of a “blowtorch-like” jet from a supermassive black hole, and it seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory.

Currently, an international group of astronomers are awaiting a once-in-a-lifetime event, when a binary system in the Northern Crown will eventually trigger a thermonuclear explosion, or a nova, big enough to be seen from Earth. While that team awaits that event, another group of astronomers made a discovery concerning a supermassive black hole’s jet, and an unusually large amount of erupting stars.

The new discovery has the team of astronomers confounded and looking for an explanation. “We don’t know what’s going on, but it’s just a very exciting finding,” remarked Alec Lessing of Stanford University. “This means there’s something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings.”

According to NASA, a nova erupts in a double-star system where an ageing star spills hydrogen onto a burned-out white dwarf companion star. As the dwarf star collects a mile-deep surface layer of hydrogen, that layers explodes like a nuclear bomb. The white dwarf star is not destroyed from the nova eruption, but instead goes back to syphoning fuel from its companion, with the nova-outburst cycle repeating itself.

To put the number of eruptions into perspective, Hubble spotted twice as many novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the galaxy in which It is located. NASA explained the jet is launched by a 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole surrounded by a disc of swirling matter. As matter falls into the black hole, it launches a 3000-light-year-long jet of plasma blasting through space at nearly the speed of light. Everything in its path would be sizzled, according to the space agency, and surprisingly, anything caught near it as well.

“There’s something that the jet is doing to the star systems that wander into the surrounding neighbourhood. Maybe the jet somehow snowplows hydrogen fuel onto the white dwarfs, causing them to erupt more frequently,” explained Lessing. Lessing added, it is not clear that it is a physical pushing, as it could also be the effect of the pressure of the light emanating from the jet. He noted, “When you deliver hydrogen faster, you get eruptions faster.”

The team noted they are not the first to suggest there’s more activity going on around the M87 jet. However, Hubble has shown the activity with many more examples and statistical significance than ever before.

Chiara Circosta, an ESA Research Fellow, added, “We are witnessing an intriguing but puzzling phenomenon. Such detailed observations of nearby galaxies are precious to expand our understanding of how jets interact with their host galaxies and potentially affect star formation.

The group of astronomers gives Hubble all the credit for the discovery. Ground-based telescopes do not have the clarity to see novae deep inside M87, and cannot resolve stars or stellar eruptions close to the galaxy’s core because the black hole’s surroundings are too bright.