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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.
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Stanford University, Stanford, CA
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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
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By NASA
4 Min Read In Odd Galaxy, NASA’s Webb Finds Potential Missing Link to First Stars
What appears as a faint dot in this James Webb Space Telescope image may actually be a groundbreaking discovery. Full image and details below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alex Cameron (Oxford) Looking deep into the early universe with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found something unprecedented: a galaxy with an odd light signature, which they attribute to its gas outshining its stars. Found approximately one billion years after the big bang, galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (9422) may be a missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the universe’s first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.
Image A: Galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (NIRCam Image)
What appears as a faint dot in this James Webb Space Telescope image may actually be a groundbreaking discovery. Detailed information on galaxy GS-NDG-9422, captured by Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, indicates that the light we see in this image is coming from the galaxy’s hot gas, rather than its stars. Astronomers think that the galaxy’s stars are so extremely hot (more than 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 80,000 degrees Celsius) that they are heating up the nebular gas, allowing it to shine even brighter than the stars themselves. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Alex Cameron (Oxford) “My first thought in looking at the galaxy’s spectrum was, ‘that’s weird,’ which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began,” said lead researcher Alex Cameron of the University of Oxford.
Cameron reached out to colleague Harley Katz, a theorist, to discuss the strange data. Working together, their team found that computer models of cosmic gas clouds heated by very hot, massive stars, to an extent that the gas shone brighter than the stars, was nearly a perfect match to Webb’s observations.
“It looks like these stars must be much hotter and more massive than what we see in the local universe, which makes sense because the early universe was a very different environment,” said Katz, of Oxford and the University of Chicago.
In the local universe, typical hot, massive stars have a temperature ranging between 70,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit (40,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius). According to the team, galaxy 9422 has stars hotter than 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit (80,000 degrees Celsius).
The research team suspects that the galaxy is in the midst of a brief phase of intense star formation inside a cloud of dense gas that is producing a large number of massive, hot stars. The gas cloud is being hit with so many photons of light from the stars that it is shining extremely brightly.
Image B: Galaxy GS-NDG-9422 Spectrum (NIRSpec)
This comparison of the data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope with a computer model prediction highlights the same sloping feature that first caught the eye of astronomer Alex Cameron, lead researcher of a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The bottom graphic compares what astronomers would expect to see in a “typical” galaxy, with its light coming predominantly from stars (white line), with a theoretical model of light coming from hot nebular gas, outshining stars (yellow line). The model comes from Cameron’s collaborator, theoretical astronomer Harley Katz, and together they realized the similarities between the model and Cameron’s Webb observations of galaxy GS-NDG-9422 (top). The unusual downturn of the galaxy’s spectrum, leading to an exaggerated spike in neutral hydrogen, is nearly a perfect match to Katz’s model of a spectrum dominated by super-heated gas.
While this is still only one example, Cameron, Katz, and their fellow researchers think the conclusion that galaxy GS-NDG-9422 is dominated by nebular light, rather than starlight, is their strongest jumping-off point for future investigation. They are looking for more galaxies around the same one-billion-year mark in the universe’s history, hoping to find more examples of a new type of galaxy, a missing link in the history of galactic evolution.
NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI) In addition to its novelty, nebular gas outshining stars is intriguing because it is something predicted in the environments of the universe’s first generation of stars, which astronomers classify as Population III stars.
“We know that this galaxy does not have Population III stars, because the Webb data shows too much chemical complexity. However, its stars are different than what we are familiar with – the exotic stars in this galaxy could be a guide for understanding how galaxies transitioned from primordial stars to the types of galaxies we already know,” said Katz.
At this point, galaxy 9422 is one example of this phase of galaxy development, so there are still many questions to be answered. Are these conditions common in galaxies at this time period, or a rare occurrence? What more can they tell us about even earlier phases of galaxy evolution? Cameron, Katz, and their research colleagues are actively identifying more galaxies to add to this population to better understand what was happening in the universe within the first billion years after the big bang.
“It’s a very exciting time, to be able to use the Webb telescope to explore this time in the universe that was once inaccessible,” Cameron said. “We are just at the beginning of new discoveries and understanding.”
The research paper is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
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Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 24, 2024 Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By NASA
The NASA Ames Science Directorate recognizes the outstanding contributions of (pictured left to right) Don Sullivan, Serena Trieu, Emmett Quigley, and Zara Mirmalek. Their commitment to the NASA mission represents the talent, camaraderie, and vision needed to explore this world and beyond.
Earth Science Star: Don Sullivan
Don Sullivan enables cutting-edge research in the Earth Science Division, serving as telemetry and communications lead for the Airborne Science Program. As Principal Investigator, Don led the highly successful and innovative STRATO long-duration balloon flight project in August 2024 with the United States Forest Service (USFS) that demonstrated last-mile connectivity and near real-time infrared imagery to a remote wildfire incident command station.
Space Biosciences Star: Serena Trieu
Serena Trieu conducts research in the Bioengineering Branch for projects that develop Earth-independent spaceflight instrumentation, especially for the International Space Station (ISS). She has excelled in coordinating the inventory for 21 spaceflight trash batches sent to Sierra Space, Inc., for ground-unit testing of the Trash Compaction Processing System (TCPS). Tapping into her innovative spirit and technical expertise, she developed a new method to prepare trash batches for the ISS without freezing.
Space Science & Astrobiology Star: Emmett Quigley
Emmett Quigley is a mechanical technician with the Astrophysics Branch who goes above and beyond to serve Ames. As a specialist in small precision manufacturing, Emmett has designed and built lab hardware, telescopes, and airborne instruments, as well as small satellites and instruments heading to the Moon and beyond. His collaborative disposition and dedication to problem solving have enabled delivery of numerous projects on behalf of the Space Science and Astrobiology Division and the Earth Science Division.
Space Science & Astrobiology Star: Zara Mirmalek
Zara Mirmalek is the Deputy Science Operations Lead for VIPER within the Space Science & Astrobiology Division and has been pivotal in the design and build efforts of the VIPER Mission Science Operations team and Mission Science Center. She has applied her expertise in science team social-technical interactions to recommend discussions, groupings, and timelines that enable the VIPER Science Team to advance pre-planning for VIPER surface operations.
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X-ray: NASA/CXC/Xiamen Univ./C. Ge; Optical: DESI collaboration; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have found a galaxy cluster has two streams of superheated gas crossing one another. This result shows that crossing the streams may lead to the creation of new structure.
Researchers have discovered an enormous, comet-like tail of hot gas — spanning over 1.6 million light-years long — trailing behind a galaxy within the galaxy cluster called Zwicky 8338 (Z8338 for short). This tail, spawned as the galaxy had some of its gas stripped off by the hot gas it is hurtling through, has split into two streams.
This is the second pair of tails trailing behind a galaxy in this system. Previously, astronomers discovered a shorter pair of tails from a different galaxy near this latest one. This newer and longer set of tails was only seen because of a deeper observation with Chandra that revealed the fainter X-rays.
Researchers have discovered a second pair of tails trailing behind a galaxy in this cluster. Previously, astronomers discovered a shorter pair of tails from a different galaxy close to this latest one. This newer and longer set of tails was only seen because of a deeper observation with Chandra that revealed the fainter X-rays that have been shown in the optical data. These tails span for over a million light-years and help determine the evolution of the galaxy cluster.X-ray: NASA/CXC/Xiamen Univ./C. Ge; Optical: DESI collaboration; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk Astronomers now have evidence that these streams trailing behind the speeding galaxies have crossed one another. Z8338 is a chaotic landscape of galaxies, superheated gas, and shock waves (akin to sonic booms created by supersonic jets) in one relatively small region of space. These galaxies are in motion because they were part of two galaxy clusters that collided with each other to create Z8338.
This new composite image shows this spectacle. X-rays from Chandra (represented in purple) outline the multimillion-degree gas that outweighs all of the galaxies in the cluster. The Chandra data also shows where this gas has been jettisoned behind the moving galaxies. Meanwhile an optical image from the Dark Energy Survey from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile shows the individual galaxies peppered throughout the same field of view.
The original gas tail discovered in Z8338 is about 800,000 light-years long and is seen as vertical in this image (see the labeled version). The researchers think the gas in this tail is being stripped away from a large galaxy as it travels through the galaxy cluster. The head of the tail is a cloud of relatively cool gas about 100,000 light-years away from the galaxy it was stripped from. This tail is also separated into two parts.
The team proposes that the detachment of the tail from the large galaxy may have been caused by the passage of the other, longer tail. Under this scenario, the tail detached from the galaxy because of the crossing of the streams.
The results give useful information about the detachment and destruction of clouds of cooler gas like those seen in the head of the detached tail. This work shows that the cloud can survive for at least 30 million years after it is detached. During that time, a new generation of stars and planets may form within it.
The Z8338 galaxy cluster and its jumble of galactic streams are located about 670 million light-years from Earth. A paper describing these results appeared in the Aug. 8, 2023, issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/525/1/1365/7239302.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
Visual Description:
This release features a composite image of two pairs of hot gas tails found inside a single galaxy cluster. The image is presented both labeled and unlabeled, with color-coded ovals encircling the hot gas tails.
In both the labeled and unlabeled versions of the image, mottled purple gas speckles a region of space dotted with distant flecks of red and white. Also present in this region of space are several glowing golden dots. These dots are individual galaxies that together form the cluster Zwicky 8338.
To our right of center is a glowing golden galaxy with a mottled V shaped cloud of purple above it. Yellow labels identify the two arms of the V as tails trailing behind the hurtling galaxy below.
To our left of center is another golden galaxy, this one surrounded by purple gas. Behind it, opening toward our right in the shape of a widening V lying on its side, are two more mottled purple clouds. Labeled in white, these newly-discovered gas tails are even larger than the previously discovered tails labeled in yellow. These tails, which overlap with the galaxy on our right, are over 1.6 million light-years long.
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Chandra X-ray Center
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