Black holes are incredible phenomena that have a huge impact on just about everything in the universe. They are found at the center of galaxies and they pull in objects from great distances.
In addition, some black holes have what is known as a jet that comes out of them. This jet is plasma that is ejected from the black hole at nearly the speed of light.
Astronomers have known about these jets for some time, but something somewhat terrifying was recently looked at through the Hubble Space Telescope.
The M87 galaxy is home to a supermassive black hole that has a plasma jet that is nearly 3000 light years long.
In addition, this galaxy has a lot of novas that occur. A nova is a cycle of eruptions that take place in a binary star system. When a star such as a red giant nears the end of its life, it expands out and grows larger as it emits some of its mass.
Some of that mass gets pulled into the smaller white dwarf star in the system.
Once that smaller star brings in a sufficient amount of the stellar material, it triggers a nuclear reaction that can be observed from Earth. However, nuclear reactions do not destroy the start.
Instead, once the reaction is done, the star begins to accumulate material from the dying star and the process repeats.
In the M87 galaxy, this occurs about once a day on average, which allows astronomers to study the events.
What a group of astronomers found is that binary star systems that are along the path of the massive plasma jet from the black hole produce novas about twice as often as the rest of them in the galaxy.
They do not yet know why this is the case, but have published a study in the Astrophysical Journal to shine light on the fact this is occurring and hopefully generate additional interest and study.
In a statement, the lead offer, Alec Lessing of Stanford University told NASA:
“We don’t know what’s going on, but it’s just a very exciting finding. This means there’s something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings.”
While nothing is certain, they do have some theories of what could be causing this, as is explained in the statement:
“There’s something that the jet is doing to the star systems that wander into the surrounding neighborhood. Maybe the jet somehow snowplows hydrogen fuel onto the white dwarfs, causing them to erupt more frequently. But it’s not clear that it’s a physical pushing. It could be the effect of the pressure of the light emanating from the jet. When you deliver hydrogen faster, you get eruptions faster. Something might be doubling the mass transfer rate onto the white dwarfs near the jet.”
Additional study will undoubtedly need to be done on this amazing, and terrifying, phenomena. You can learn more about this event in a brief video published by NASA:
Black hole jets are scary.
Let’s hope one never crosses our path.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.