{"id":3693,"date":"2022-02-11T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=3693"},"modified":"2022-01-28T04:29:00","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T04:29:00","slug":"in-a-bizarre-twist-scientists-found-a-black-hole-thats-forming-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/in-a-bizarre-twist-scientists-found-a-black-hole-thats-forming-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"In a Bizarre Twist, Scientists Found a Black Hole That\u2019s Forming Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I think we\u2019ve all encountered black holes<\/a> in pop culture enough at this point to have a simple yet concise grasp of what it does<\/a>. 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<\/em> reaches the point of no return, and is taken for a wild ride on its way towards the singularity<\/em> at the center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, at least, that\u2019s how we\u2019ve understood it if not for recent findings reported in the journal Nature<\/em><\/a>. 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\u2019t really old news\u2014the Milky Way Galaxy has its own supermassive black hole core called Sagittarius A*\u2014what makes this find stand out is the fact that Henize 2-10\u2019s black hole appears to be causing stars to form instead of eating them as we expect it to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The composite image above shows the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10, located some 34 million light-years away in the constellation Pyxis. Henize 2-10 is said to contain a supermassive black hole that initiates star formation by spewing out jets of ionized material. (NASA\/CXC\/Virginia\/A.Reines et al\/NRAO\/AUI\/NSF\/STScI, 2011)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. The black hole in question, found back in 2011<\/a> by then-graduate student Amy Reines, now has more eyes trained on it, which revealed its true star-forming nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A similar phenomenon has been observed in the famous galaxy M87, whose black hole core is emitting a similar, albeit likely more powerful, stream of ionized matter along the black hole\u2019s axis of rotation. (NASA\/Hubble Heritage Team\/STScI\/AURA, 2000)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

First author and MSU graduate student Zachary Schutte said in their statement to NASA: \u201cAt only 30 million light-years away, Henize 2\u201310 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schutte continued: \u201cAny 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.\u201d Additionally, the black hole within Henize 2-10 is about 1 million times the mass of our own Sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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