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Cassiopeia A - The Colorful Aftermath of a Violent Stellar Death
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Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble Sees… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 5 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Sees Aftermath of Galaxy’s Scrape with Milky Way
This artist’s concept shows a closeup of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the Milky Way galaxy’s nearest neighbors. Credits:
NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) A story of survival is unfolding at the outer reaches of our galaxy, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is witnessing the saga.
The Large Magellanic Cloud, also called the LMC, is one of the Milky Way galaxy’s nearest neighbors. This dwarf galaxy looms large on the southern nighttime sky at 20 times the apparent diameter of the full Moon.
Many researchers theorize that the LMC is not in orbit around our galaxy, but is just passing by. These scientists think that the LMC has just completed its closest approach to the much more massive Milky Way. This passage has blown away most of the spherical halo of gas that surrounds the LMC.
Now, for the first time, astronomers been able to measure the size of the LMC’s halo – something they could do only with Hubble. In a new study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers were surprised to find that it is so extremely small, about 50,000 light-years across. That’s around 10 times smaller than halos of other galaxies that are the LMC’s mass. Its compactness tells the story of its encounter with the Milky Way.
“The LMC is a survivor,” said Andrew Fox of AURA/STScI for the European Space Agency in Baltimore, who was principal investigator on the observations. “Even though it’s lost a lot of its gas, it’s got enough left to keep forming new stars. So new star-forming regions can still be created. A smaller galaxy wouldn’t have lasted – there would be no gas left, just a collection of aging red stars.”
This artist’s concept shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, in the foreground as it passes through the gaseous halo of the much more massive Milky Way galaxy. The encounter has blown away most of the spherical halo of gas that surrounds the LMC, as illustrated by the trailing gas stream reminiscent of a comet’s tail. Still, a compact halo remains, and scientists do not expect this residual halo to be lost. The team surveyed the halo by using the background light of 28 quasars, an exceptionally bright type of active galactic nucleus that shines across the universe like a lighthouse beacon. Their light allows scientists to “see” the intervening halo gas indirectly through the absorption of the background light. The lines represent the Hubble Space Telescope’s view from its orbit around Earth to the distant quasars through the LMC’s gas. NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
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Though quite a bit worse for wear, the LMC still retains a compact, stubby halo of gas – something that it wouldn’t have been able to hold onto gravitationally had it been less massive. The LMC is 10 percent the mass of the Milky Way, making it heftier than most dwarf galaxies.
“Because of the Milky Way’s own giant halo, the LMC’s gas is getting truncated, or quenched,” explained STScI’s Sapna Mishra, the lead author on the paper chronicling this discovery. “But even with this catastrophic interaction with the Milky Way, the LMC is able to retain 10 percent of its halo because of its high mass.”
A Gigantic Hair Dryer
Most of the LMC’s halo was blown away due to a phenomenon called ram-pressure stripping. The dense environment of the Milky Way pushes back against the incoming LMC and creates a wake of gas trailing the dwarf galaxy – like the tail of a comet.
“I like to think of the Milky Way as this giant hairdryer, and it’s blowing gas off the LMC as it comes into us,” said Fox. “The Milky Way is pushing back so forcefully that the ram pressure has stripped off most of the original mass of the LMC’s halo. There’s only a little bit left, and it’s this small, compact leftover that we’re seeing now.”
As the ram pressure pushes away much of the LMC’s halo, the gas slows down and eventually will rain into the Milky Way. But because the LMC has just gotten past its closest approach to the Milky Way and is moving outward into deep space again, scientists do not expect the whole halo will be lost.
Only with Hubble
To conduct this study, the research team analyzed ultraviolet observations from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at STScI. Most ultraviolet light is blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere, so it cannot be observed with ground-based telescopes. Hubble is the only current space telescope tuned to detect these wavelengths of light, so this study was only possible with Hubble.
The team surveyed the halo by using the background light of 28 bright quasars. The brightest type of active galactic nucleus, quasars are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes. Shining like lighthouse beacons, they allow scientists to “see” the intervening halo gas indirectly through the absorption of the background light. Quasars reside throughout the universe at extreme distances from our galaxy.
This artist’s concept illustrates the Large Magellanic Cloud’s (LMC’s) encounter with the Milky Way galaxy’s gaseous halo. In the top panel, at the middle of the right side, the LMC begins crashing through our galaxy’s much more massive halo. The bright purple bow shock represents the leading edge of the LMC’s halo, which is being compressed as the Milky Way’s halo pushes back against the incoming LMC. In the middle panel, part of the halo is being stripped and blown back into a streaming tail of gas that eventually will rain into the Milky Way. The bottom panel shows the progression of this interaction, as the LMC’s comet-like tail becomes more defined. A compact LMC halo remains. Because the LMC is just past its closest approach to the Milky Way and is moving outward into deep space again, scientists do not expect the residual halo will be lost. NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
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The scientists used data from Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) to detect the presence of the halo’s gas by the way it absorbs certain colors of light from background quasars. A spectrograph breaks light into its component wavelengths to reveal clues to the object’s state, temperature, speed, quantity, distance, and composition. With COS, they measured the velocity of the gas around the LMC, which allowed them to determine the size of the halo.
Because of its mass and proximity to the Milky Way, the LMC is a unique astrophysics laboratory. Seeing the LMC’s interplay with our galaxy helps scientists understand what happened in the early universe, when galaxies were closer together. It also shows just how messy and complicated the process of galaxy interaction is.
Looking to the Future
The team will next study the front side of the LMC’s halo, an area that has not yet been explored.
“In this new program, we are going to probe five sightlines in the region where the LMC’s halo and the Milky Way’s halo are colliding,” said co-author Scott Lucchini of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “This is the location where the halos are compressed, like two balloons pushing against each other.”
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
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Last Updated Nov 14, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024. The space telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy across the entire sky, capturing the universe in more than 100 colors. BAE Systems The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Here’s what astronomers will do with all that color.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission won’t be the first space telescope to observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies when it launches no later than April 2025, but it will be the first to observe them in 102 colors. Although these colors aren’t visible to the human eye because they’re in the infrared range, scientists will use them to learn about topics that range from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water on planets like Earth.
“We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based jointly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Southern California. “Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries.”
Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will collect infrared light, which has wavelengths slightly longer than what the human eye can detect. The telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy to take the light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies and separate it into individual colors, the way a prism transforms sunlight into a rainbow. This color breakdown can reveal various properties of an object, including its composition and its distance from Earth.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use spectroscopy — the splitting of light into its component wavelengths — to study the universe. Watch this video to learn more about spectroscopy. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Here are the three key science investigations SPHEREx will conduct with its colorful all-sky map.
Cosmic Origins
What human eyes perceive as colors are distinct wavelengths of light. The only difference between colors is the distance between the crests of the light wave. If a star or galaxy is moving, its light waves get stretched or compressed, changing the colors they appear to emit. (It’s the same with sound waves, which is why the pitch of an ambulance siren seems to go up as its approaches and lowers after it passes.) Astronomers can measure the degree to which light is stretched or compressed and use that to infer the distance to the object.
SPHEREx will apply this principle to map the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D. By doing so, scientists can study the physics of inflation, the event that caused the universe to expand by a trillion-trillion fold in less than a second after the big bang. This rapid expansion amplified small differences in the distribution of matter. Because these differences remain imprinted on the distribution of galaxies today, measuring how galaxies are distributed can tell scientists more about how inflation worked.
Galactic Origins
SPHEREx will also measure the collective glow created by all galaxies near and far — in other words, the total amount of light emitted by galaxies over cosmic history. Scientists have tried to estimate this total light output by observing individual galaxies and extrapolating to the trillions of galaxies in the universe. But these counts may leave out some faint or hidden light sources, such as galaxies too small or too distant for telescopes to easily detect.
With spectroscopy, SPHEREx can also show astronomers how the total light output has changed over time. For example, it may reveal that the universe’s earliest generations of galaxies produced more light than previously thought, either because they were more plentiful or bigger and brighter than current estimates suggest. Because light takes time to travel through space, we see distant objects as they were in the past. And, as light travels, the universe’s expansion stretches it, changing its wavelength and its color. Scientists can therefore use SPHEREx data to determine how far light has traveled and where in the universe’s history it was released.
Water’s Origins
SPHEREx will measure the abundance of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life as we know it along more than 9 million unique directions across the Milky Way galaxy. This information will help scientists better understand how available these key molecules are to forming planets. Research indicates that most of the water in our galaxy is in the form of ice rather than gas, frozen to the surface of small dust grains. In dense clouds where stars form, these icy dust grains can become part of newly forming planets, with the potential to create oceans like the ones on Earth.
The mission’s colorful view will enable scientists to identify these materials, because chemical elements and molecules leave a unique signature in the colors they absorb and emit.
Big Picture
Many space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and James Webb, can provide high-resolution, in-depth spectroscopy of individual objects or small sections of space. Other space telescopes, like NASA’s retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), were designed to take images of the whole sky. SPHEREx combines these abilities to apply spectroscopy to the entire sky.
By combining observations from telescopes that target specific parts of the sky with SPHEREx’s big-picture view, scientists will get a more complete — and more colorful — perspective of the universe.
More About SPHEREx
SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available.
For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex/
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Last Updated Oct 31, 2024 Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble Sees a… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 3 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Sees a Stellar Volcano
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures a spectacular view the star R Aquarii. Credits:
NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided a dramatic and colorful close-up look at one of the most rambunctious stars in our galaxy, weaving a huge spiral pattern among the stars.
Located approximately 700 light-years away, a binary star system called R Aquarii undergoes violent eruptions that blast out huge filaments of glowing gas. The twisted stellar outflows make the region look like a lawn sprinkler gone berserk. This dramatically demonstrates how the universe redistributes the products of nuclear energy that form deep inside stars and jet back into space.
R Aquarii belongs to a class of double stars called symbiotic stars. The primary star is an aging red giant and its companion is a compact burned-out star known as a white dwarf. The red giant primary star is classified as a Mira variable that is over 400 times larger than our Sun. The bloated monster star pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a roughly 390-day period. At its peak the star is blinding at nearly 5,000 times our Sun’s brightness.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the binary star system R Aquarii. NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble) When the white dwarf star swings closest to the red giant along its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally siphons off hydrogen gas. This material accumulates on the dwarf star’s surface until it undergoes spontaneous nuclear fusion, making that surface explode like a gigantic hydrogen bomb. After the outburst, the fueling cycle begins again.
This outburst ejects geyser-like filaments shooting out from the core, forming weird loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers. The plasma is twisted by the force of the explosion and channeled upwards and outwards by strong magnetic fields. The outflow appears to bend back on itself into a spiral pattern. The plasma is shooting into space over 1 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes! The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo.
Hubble first observed the star in 1990. R Aquarii was resolved into two very bright stars separated by about 1.6 billion miles. The ESA/Hubble team now has made a unique timelapse of R Aquarii’s dynamic behavior, from observations spanning from 2014 to 2023. Across the five images, the rapid and dramatic evolution of the binary star and its surrounding nebula can be seen. The binary star dims and brightens due to strong pulsations in the red giant star.
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This video features five frames spanning from 2014 to 2023 of R Aquarii. These frames show the brightness of the central binary changing over time due to strong pulsations in the red giant star. The central structures spiral outward due to their interaction with material previously ejected by the binary. This timelapse highlights the value of Hubble’s high resolution optical observations in the changing universe, known as time-domain astronomy. NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin , Mahdi Zamani , N. Bartmann (ESA/Hubble) The scale of the event is extraordinary even in astronomical terms. Space-blasted material can be traced out to at least 248 billion miles from the stars, or 24 times our solar system’s diameter. Images like these and more from Hubble are expected to revolutionize our ideas about such unique stellar “volcanoes” as R Aquarii.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
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Last Updated Oct 16, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Watch how the three stars in the system called TIC 290061484 eclipse each other over about 75 days. The line at the bottom is the plot of the system’s brightness over time, as seen by TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). The inset shows the system from above.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Professional and amateur astronomers teamed up with artificial intelligence to find an unmatched stellar trio called TIC 290061484, thanks to cosmic “strobe lights” captured by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
The system contains a set of twin stars orbiting each other every 1.8 days, and a third star that circles the pair in just 25 days. The discovery smashes the record for shortest outer orbital period for this type of system, set in 1956, which had a third star orbiting an inner pair in 33 days.
“Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures of its stars,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “And we can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve.”
A paper, led by Kostov, describing the results was published in The Astrophysical Journal Oct. 2.
This artist’s concept illustrates how tightly the three stars in the system called TIC 290061484 orbit each other. If they were placed at the center of our solar system, all the stars’ orbits would be contained a space smaller than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun. The sizes of the triplet stars and the Sun are also to scale.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Flickers in starlight helped reveal the tight trio, which is located in the constellation Cygnus. The system happens to be almost flat from our perspective. This means the stars each cross right in front of, or eclipse, each other as they orbit. When that happens, the nearer star blocks some of the farther star’s light.
Using machine learning, scientists filtered through enormous sets of starlight data from TESS to identify patterns of dimming that reveal eclipses. Then, a small team of citizen scientists filtered further, relying on years of experience and informal training to find particularly interesting cases.
These amateur astronomers, who are co-authors on the new study, met as participants in an online citizen science project called Planet Hunters, which was active from 2010 to 2013. The volunteers later teamed up with professional astronomers to create a new collaboration called the Visual Survey Group, which has been active for over a decade.
“We’re mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects,” said Saul Rappaport, an emeritus professor of physics at MIT in Cambridge. Rappaport co-authored the paper and has helped lead the Visual Survey Group for more than a decade. “It’s exciting to identify a system like this because they’re rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.” Many more likely speckle our galaxy, waiting to be discovered.
Partly because the stars in the newfound system orbit in nearly the same plane, scientists say it’s likely very stable despite their tight configuration (the trio’s orbits fit within a smaller area than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun). Each star’s gravity doesn’t perturb the others too much, like they could if their orbits were tilted in different directions.
But while their orbits will likely remain stable for millions of years, “no one lives here,” Rappaport said. “We think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have disrupted planets from forming very closely around any of the stars.” The exception could be a distant planet orbiting the three stars as if they were one.
As the inner stars age, they will expand and ultimately merge, triggering a supernova explosion in around 20 to 40 million years.
In the meantime, astronomers are hunting for triple stars with even shorter orbits. That’s hard to do with current technology, but a new tool is on the way.
This graphic highlights the search areas of three transit-spotting missions: NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), and the retired Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler found 13 triply eclipsing triple star systems, TESS has found more than 100 so far, and astronomers expect Roman to find more than 1,000.NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Images from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be much more detailed than TESS’s. The same area of the sky covered by a single TESS pixel will fit more than 36,000 Roman pixels. And while TESS took a wide, shallow look at the entire sky, Roman will pierce deep into the heart of our galaxy where stars crowd together, providing a core sample rather than skimming the whole surface.
“We don’t know much about a lot of the stars in the center of the galaxy except for the brightest ones,” said Brian Powell, a co-author and data scientist at Goddard. “Roman’s high-resolution view will help us measure light from stars that usually blur together, providing the best look yet at the nature of star systems in our galaxy.”
And since Roman will monitor light from hundreds of millions of stars as part of one of its main surveys, it will help astronomers find more triple star systems in which all the stars eclipse each other.
“We’re curious why we haven’t found star systems like these with even shorter outer orbital periods,” said Powell. “Roman should help us find them and bring us closer to figuring out what their limits might be.”
Roman could also find eclipsing stars bound together in even larger groups — half a dozen, or perhaps even more all orbiting each other like bees buzzing around a hive.
“Before scientists discovered triply eclipsing triple star systems, we didn’t expect them to be out there,” said co-author Tamás Borkovits, a senior research fellow at the Baja Observatory of The University of Szeged in Hungary. “But once we found them, we thought, well why not? Roman, too, may reveal never-before-seen categories of systems and objects that will surprise astronomers.”
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission managed by NASA Goddard and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.
NASA’s citizen science projects are collaborations between scientists and interested members of the public and do not require U.S. citizenship. Through these collaborations, volunteers (known as citizen scientists) have helped make thousands of important scientific discoveries. To get involved with a project, visit NASA’s Citizen Science page.
Download additional images and video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Oct 02, 2024 Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble Finds that… Missions Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 6 min read
NASA’s Hubble Finds that a Black Hole Beam Promotes Stellar Eruptions
This is an artist’s concept looking down into the core of the giant elliptical galaxy M87. A supermassive black hole ejects a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma, traveling at nearly the speed of light. In the foreground, to the right is a binary star system. The system is far from the black hole, but in the vicinity of the jet. In the system an aging, swelled-up, normal star spills hydrogen onto a burned-out white dwarf companion star. As the hydrogen accumulates on the surface of the dwarf, it reaches a tipping point where it explodes like a hydrogen bomb. Novae frequently pop-off throughout the giant galaxy of 1 trillion stars, but those near the jet seem to explode more frequently. So far, it’s anybody’s guess why black hole jets enhance the rate of nova eruptions. NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)
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In a surprise finding, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. The stars, called novae, are not caught inside the jet, but apparently in a dangerous neighborhood nearby.
The finding is confounding researchers searching for an explanation. “We don’t know what’s going on, but it’s just a very exciting finding,” said lead author Alec Lessing of Stanford University. “This means there’s something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings.”
A nova erupts in a double-star system where an aging, swelled-up, normal star spills hydrogen onto a burned-out white dwarf companion star. When the dwarf has tanked up a mile-deep surface layer of hydrogen that layer explodes like a giant nuclear bomb. The white dwarf isn’t destroyed by the nova eruption, which ejects its surface layer and then goes back to siphoning fuel from its companion, and the nova-outburst cycle starts over again.
Hubble found twice as many novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the giant galaxy during the surveyed time period. The jet is launched by a 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole surrounded by a disk of swirling matter. The black hole, engorged with infalling matter, launches a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma blazing through space at nearly the speed of light. Anything caught in the energetic beam would be sizzled. But being near its blistering outflow is apparently also risky, according to the new Hubble findings.
A Hubble Space Telescope image of the giant galaxy M87 shows a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma blasting from the galaxy’s 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole. The blowtorch-like jet seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. These novae are not caught inside the jet, but are apparently in a dangerous neighborhood nearby. During a recent 9-month survey, astronomers using Hubble found twice as many of these novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the galaxy. The galaxy is the home of several trillion stars and thousands of star-like globular star clusters. NASA, ESA, STScI, Alec Lessing (Stanford University), Mike Shara (AMNH); Acknowledgment: Edward Baltz (Stanford University); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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The finding of twice as many novae near the jet implies that there are twice as many nova-forming double-star systems near the jet or that these systems erupt twice as often as similar systems elsewhere in the galaxy.
“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,” said Lessing. “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.” Another idea the researchers considered is that the jet is heating the dwarf’s companion star, causing it to overflow further and dump more hydrogen onto the dwarf. However, the researchers calculated that this heating is not nearly large enough to have this effect.
“We’re not the first people who’ve said that it looks like there’s more activity going on around the M87 jet,” said co-investigator Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “But Hubble has shown this enhanced activity with far more examples and statistical significance than we ever had before.”
Shortly after Hubble’s launch in 1990, astronomers used its first-generation Faint Object Camera (FOC) to peer into the center of M87 where the monster black hole lurks. They noted that unusual things were happening around the black hole. Almost every time Hubble looked, astronomers saw bluish “transient events” that could be evidence for novae popping off like camera flashes from nearby paparazzi. But the FOC’s view was so narrow that Hubble astronomers couldn’t look away from the jet to compare with the near-jet region. For over two decades, the results remained mysteriously tantalizing.
Compelling evidence for the jet’s influence on the stars of the host galaxy was collected over a nine-month interval of Hubble observing with newer, wider-view cameras to count the erupting novae. This was a challenge for the telescope’s observing schedule because it required revisiting M87 precisely every five days for another snapshot. Adding up all of the M87 images led to the deepest images of M87 that have ever been taken.
In a surprise finding, astronomers, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of M87, a huge galaxy 54 million light years away, seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris Hubble found 94 novae in the one-third of M87 that its camera can encompass. “The jet was not the only thing that we were looking at — we were looking at the entire inner galaxy. Once you plotted all known novae on top of M87 you didn’t need statistics to convince yourself that there is an excess of novae along the jet. This is not rocket science. We made the discovery simply by looking at the images. And while we were really surprised, our statistical analyses of the data confirmed what we clearly saw,” said Shara.
This accomplishment is entirely due to Hubble’s unique capabilities. Ground-based telescope images do not have the clarity to see novae deep inside M87. They cannot resolve stars or stellar eruptions close to the galaxy’s core because the black hole’s surroundings are far too bright. Only Hubble can detect novae against the bright M87 background.
Novae are remarkably common in the universe. One nova erupts somewhere in M87 every day. But since there are at least 100 billion galaxies throughout the visible universe, around 1 million novae erupt every second somewhere out there.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Explore More:
Hubble’s Messier Catalog: M87
Hubble Black Holes
Monster Black Holes are Everywhere
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
Science Contact:
Alec Lessing
Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Michael Shara
American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY
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Last Updated Sep 26, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Black Holes Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Missions Stars The Universe Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
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