I think we’ve all encountered black holes in pop culture enough at this point to have a simple yet concise grasp of what it does. It has a very strong gravitational field, so strong that not even light manages to escape its grasp; it basically serves as a sinkhole in space, in such a way that anything that wanders too close to its event horizon reaches the point of no return, and is taken for a wild ride on its way towards the singularity at the center.
Or, at least, that’s how we’ve understood it if not for recent findings reported in the journal Nature. In there, scientists reported on the spotting of a peculiar supermassive black hole in the center of the Henize 2-10 galaxy some 34 million light-years away. While that in itself isn’t really old news—the Milky Way Galaxy has its own supermassive black hole core called Sagittarius A*—what makes this find stand out is the fact that Henize 2-10’s black hole appears to be causing stars to form instead of eating them as we expect it to do.
This particular black hole appears to be going in a direction opposite its peers, as it is spewing out jets of ionized gas that feeds a nearby star birth region, according to a NASA press release. The black hole in question, found back in 2011 by then-graduate student Amy Reines, now has more eyes trained on it, which revealed its true star-forming nature.
“Ten years ago, as a graduate student thinking I would spend my career on star formation, I looked at the data from Henize 2-10 and everything changed,” said Reines, who now works as the principal investigator on the new observations reported and is an assistant professor at the Montana State University (MSU), having been powered by data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
First author and MSU graduate student Zachary Schutte said in their statement to NASA: “At only 30 million light-years away, Henize 2–10 is close enough that Hubble was able to capture both images and spectroscopic evidence of a black hole outflow very clearly. The additional surprise was that, rather than suppressing star formation, the outflow was triggering the birth of new stars.”
Schutte continued: “Any time that we find new interactions between [black holes] and their host galaxies, especially in dwarf galaxies like this, it speaks to possible ways stars were formed and how galaxies grew in the early universe.” Additionally, the black hole within Henize 2-10 is about 1 million times the mass of our own Sun.
Scientists remark on the possibilities that the Henize 2-10 find may bring to the fold, including finding clues for the true origin of supermassive black holes. Experts believe the secret may lie within dwarf galaxies like Henize 2-10, whose sizes had remained small; to them, this means that the black holes within them serve as windows to peer into a time in the early universe when black holes were just beginning to form.
References
- Choi, C. (2022, January 21). Hubble telescope spots a black hole fostering baby stars in a dwarf galaxy. Space.Com. https://www.space.com/black-hole-star-formation-hubble-telescope-image
- Hubble finds a black hole igniting star formation in a dwarf galaxy. (2022, January 19). HubbleSite.Org. http://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-002
- MSU News Service. (2022, January 24). Montana State research shows creative side of massive black holes. Montana State University. http://www.montana.edu/news/21798/montana-state-research-shows-creative-side-of-massive-black-holes
- Reines, A. E., Sivakoff, G. R., Johnson, K. E., & Brogan, C. L. (2011). An actively accreting massive black hole in the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10. Nature, 470(7332), 66–68. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09724
- Schutte, Z., & Reines, A. E. (2022). Black-hole-triggered star formation in the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10. Nature, 601(7893), 329–333. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04215-6
- Wilkins, A. (2022, January 19). Weird black hole spewed star-forming jets 500 light years long. New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2305275-weird-black-hole-spewed-star-forming-jets-500-light-years-long/
