Jets From Black Holes Cause Stars to Explode, Hubble Reveals – Agen BRILink and BRI – Agenbrilink.net

Is there anything more amazing in space than black holes, those incredible regions of space-time so dense with matter that they collapse under their own gravity? Actually yes: Some of these black hole jets seem to cause stars to explode.

These stars are not in the direct path of the jet, but they are close enough to the jet of particles approaching the speed of light to explode it. These stars are white dwarfs – stellar shells that burn out and take hydrogen from their companion stars. When there is a layer of hydrogen a mile thick on the surface of the dwarf, the layer explodes from the star and the cycle repeats.

“We don’t know what’s going on, but this is a very interesting discovery,” Alec Lessing, an astronomer at Stanford University and lead author of a new study describing the phenomenon, told ESA. spread.

In his latest work – to be published in the Astrophysical Journal and now currently hosted on the arXiv preprint server – the team studied 135 novae in the galaxy M87, at the center of which is the massive black hole of the same name. M87 has a mass of 6.5 billion times the size of the Sun and is the first black hole to be imaged directly, based on research conducted in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

The team found twice as many novae erupting closer to M87’s plasma jet 3,000 light-years away than anywhere else in the galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope also took direct pictures of M87’s jet, which you can see below in bright blue detail. Although it looks very calm in the image, its speed deceives you: these are long tendrils of superhot particles near the speed of light, which in some way stimulate the star.

Although researchers previously thought there was more activity around the jets, the new observations with Hubble’s wider camera show more of the novae’s brightness – suggesting they are releasing hydrogen from the layers. their surface.

“There’s something the jets are doing to the star systems hanging in the neighborhood. “Maybe the jet is somehow spreading hydrogen fuel onto the white dwarfs, causing them to erupt more often,” Lessing said in the release. “But it’s not clear if it was a physical push. This could be the effect of the light pressure coming from the beam. When you deliver hydrogen faster, you have a faster eruption.”

The new Hubble image of M87 is also the deepest image ever taken, thanks to Hubble’s newest camera. Although the team writes in the paper that there is a 0.1% to 1% chance that their observations can be considered random, most signs point to the jets being in a way somehow giving energy to the star.

These are difficult times for black hole jets, which are sometimes neglected – despite their real physics – when we talk about black holes. Just last week, another research team announced the discovery of the longest black hole jet ever known, located about 23 million light years from the black hole. In other words, the black hole’s jet is the size of 140 Milky Way galaxies lined up end to end.