Infrared images show an enormous black hole creating new stars.

pixabay.com

The 'umbilical chord' for newborn stars discovered by the Hubble telescope is 500 light-years long.

Henize 2-10 galaxy has a supermassive black hole located around 34 million light-years from Earth. It has been observed emitting immense, 500 light-years-long jets of ionized plasma from its center at a speed of around 1 million mph (1.6 million km/h).

This is the first time a black hole in a dwarf galaxy (a galaxy with less than 1 billion stars) has been observed spawning stars, thanks to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Nature journal published research on Jan. 19 describing the astonishing discovery.

As an astrophysicist at Montana State University, study co-author Amy Reines said in a statement, "From the beginning, I knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star-forming region located 230 light years from the black hole." Thanks to the telescope's excellent resolution, we can fit the gas velocity pattern observed by Hubble to a model of a wobbling or precessing outflow from a black hole.

Researchers saw the jet's narrow tendril extending from the black hole across the galaxy to a brilliant star nursery. Astronomers thought that millions to billions of times larger than stellar-mass black holes, supermassive black holes impeded rather than facilitated star formation in dwarf galaxies.

Lead author Zachary Schutte, a doctoral student at Montana State University, said in a statement that Henize 2-10 is close enough to Hubble to acquire photos and spectroscopic evidence of a black hole outflow. Another surprise was that the outflow was driving the creation of new stars, rather than suppressing star formation."

Sucking material from neighboring gas clouds or stars, black holes fling it back into space as a blazing plasma flying close to the speed of light to create their jets. For future stars, the gas clouds that come into direct contact with the jet will be excellent if heated to the right temperature.

NASA says that if the jets heat the gas clouds up too high, they may lose their ability to cool back down in the way necessary for star formation. In contrast, Henize 2-10 had a moderate, less-massive black hole outflow that provided ideal conditions for star formation.

The researcher hopes that examining this black hole in greater detail may help them better understand the genesis of larger black holes in the cosmos and the processes that led to their huge growth. In addition, the team's high-resolution method for seeing the black hole's faint signal can now be used to discover others like it.

We have no idea where the first black holes came from. Therefore it's become a significant question: "Where did they come from?" Reines made the statement. This black hole seeding scenario may be remembered by dwarf galaxies, which otherwise would have been lost to the passage of time and space.

Reference: https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-giving-birth

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/illustrations/bumi-planet-bola-dunia-1385689/

Did a black hole give birth to stars?

What is Monster Blackhole?

Did a black hole use to be a star?

Has NASA found a black hole?

How are stars born?

Can a black hole create a galaxy?

Can black holes become stars again?

How is a black hole born?