Hubble image of the giant galaxy M87 with a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma shooting out of the galaxy’s central black hole. The jet, which looks like a blowtorch, appears to cause stars to erupt in its path – NASA, ESA, A. LESSING (STANFORD UNIVERSITY)
September 26 () –
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured that the jet from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy appears to cause stars to erupt throughout his career.
The stars, called novae, are not trapped in the jet but are apparently in a dangerous neighborhood nearby, according to this finding, which has baffled researchers seeking an explanation.
“We don’t know what’s going on, but it’s a very exciting find,” he said. in a statement lead author Alec Lessing of Stanford University. “This means that there is something missing in our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their environment.”
A nova explodes in a double star system where an aging, swollen normal star spills hydrogen onto a burned-out white dwarf companion star. When the dwarf has built up a surface layer of hydrogen a mile deep, that layer explodes like a giant nuclear bomb. The white dwarf is not destroyed by the nova eruption, which expels its surface layer and then sucks fuel back from its companion, and the nova burst cycle begins again.
Hubble found twice as many novae exploding near the jet as in other parts of the giant galaxy during the time period studied. The jet is launched by a central black hole of 6.5 billion solar masses surrounded by a disk of swirling matter. The black hole, filled with infalling matter, launches a jet of plasma 3,000 light years long that hurtles through space at nearly the speed of light. Anything caught in the energy beam would burn. But being near its scorching outflow is apparently risky too.according to new Hubble findings.
The finding of twice as many novae near the jet implies that there are twice as many nova-forming double star systems near the jet or that these systems explode twice as often as similar systems elsewhere in the galaxy.
“There is something that the jet is doing to star systems that are drifting into the surrounding neighborhood. Maybe the jet somehow causes hydrogen fuel to disperse onto the white dwarfs, which causes them to erupt more frequently“Lessing said.
“But it’s not clear that this is a physical push. It could be the effect of light pressure emanating from the jet. When you release hydrogen faster, you get faster eruptions. Something could be doubling the rate of hydrogen transfer. mass toward the white dwarfs near the jet,” he argues. Another idea the researchers considered is that the jet is heating the dwarf’s companion star, causing it to overflow more and dump more hydrogen onto the dwarf. However, the researchers They calculated that this warming is not large enough to have this effect.
“We’re not the first to say that there appears to be more activity around the M87 jet,” said co-investigator Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “But Hubble has demonstrated this enhanced activity with many more examples and statistical significance than ever before.”
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