A 3,000-Light-Year-Long Trail Of Flaming Plasma Is Streaming From A Supermassive Black Hole And Causing Nearby Stars To Explode, But Scientists Don’t Yet Know Why
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.
Supernova – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
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“There’s something that the jet is doing to the star systems that wander into the surrounding neighborhood,” said Lessing.
“Maybe the jet somehow snowplows hydrogen fuel onto the white dwarfs, causing them to erupt more frequently.”
However, the jet might not be doing any physical pushing, and it could be due to the effect of the pressure of light emanating from the jet instead.
When hydrogen is delivered faster, eruptions will occur faster. So, there could be something near the jet “doubling the mass transfer rate onto the white dwarfs.”
Another idea is that the jet is heating up the white dwarf’s companion star, causing it to overflow and spill more hydrogen onto the dwarf.
Yet, after researchers did some calculations, they realized the heating effect was not large enough to produce such a result.
Astronomers will need to directly observe star eruptions taking place around cosmic jets, which is a difficult task. But given that at least one nova erupts in M87 every day, it may just be doable.
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