A SURPRISING BLACKHOLE GIVING BIRTH TO NEW STARS RATHER THAN DEVOURING THEM !
Black holes, which are sometimes depicted as deadly monsters that devour light,
take on a less evil role in the newest Hubble Space Telescope research.
Black Holes are some of the most intriguing objects in our universe, and assumed to be
violent monsters sucking in everything. But a recent study shows something every opposite of it.
The study shows that instead of destroying and devouring stars, a black hole is creating
them! How is this possible? What is causing this balckhole to give birth to new stars?
Today we're going to talk about a pretty interesting and somewhat unexpected discovery of
what appears to be a supermassive black hole that, instead of destroying stars and consuming matter,
appears to be responsible for actually creating new stars and doing so extremely actively in
this particular galaxy not too far away from us, which is something that has never really been seen
before, despite the fact that certain theories in the past have proposed this. So let’s talk
a little more about this in detail. Also you can find the research paper in the description below
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04215-6] and make sure to give a like to the video
if you like it!
A black hole in the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is producing stars rather than devouring them.
The black hole appears to be contributing to the galaxy's inferno of new star creation.
The dwarf galaxy is located in the southern constellation Pyxis, 30 million light-years
distant. By carefully looking at the image we can see some extremely bright features here and there.
This is due to the fact that we are looking at a starburst galaxy. A galaxy recognised for having a
large number of diverse star-forming areas and for having some really gorgeous characteristics all
around the galaxy. Other current theories suggest that these starburst galaxies are typically the
result of a galactic collision or massive galactic interaction in which a large amount of gas
suddenly condenses in certain regions of the galaxy, resulting in very thick clouds that then
produce various regions where stars form. This galaxy is also rather unique as it is a form of
starburst galaxy known as a wolf rayet starburst galaxy. Wolf rayet stars are extremely interesting
and captivating. In essence, this depicts an incredibly busy region with vast quantities of gas
generating many stars and extremely big very very large stars, comparable to what's happening in
the adjacent large magellanic cloud. Some of the most extreme stars, as well as some of the most
massive, brightest, and active neighboring stars, are all found in the tarantula nebula, a portion
of the huge magellanic cloud.This is very similar in the tarantula nebula as it contains really huge
active stars. Some of them potentially hundreds of masses of the sun. This is the same thing
that is observed in the galaxy Henize 2-10, except that it is much farther away from us.
Because of its modest size, scientists first assumed this was a nebula much closer to us when
they found it, and it wasn't until the 1970s that scientists formally proved that this was a galaxy.
However, because it was assumed to be a planetary nebula, it was given the designation Henize 2-10.
Today, we know that this is a galaxy, and a pretty interesting galaxy at that. In 2011, astronomers
investigating this galaxy in greater detail discovered a relatively huge black hole within
it. This little galaxy sparked a decade-long discussion among astronomers about whether dwarf
galaxies had black holes equal to the supermassive behemoths observed in the centers of bigger
galaxies. Little Henize 2-10, which has one-tenth the amount of stars contained in our Milky Way,
is set to play a significant role in resolving the enigma of where supermassive black holes
originated in the first place. The blackhole was approximately 3 Million masses of the sun which is
surprisingly massive for such a small galaxy. It is somewhat similar in mass to the Black hole in
the center of our milky way even though the milky way possesses approximately 10 times more stars.
But, of course, this is an exception, not the rule; we don't anticipate such big black holes
to exist within these galaxies. So this is already quite a big mystery. This is very huge for a dwarf
galaxy and a highly rare phenomenon, and the presence of such a large black hole in such a
tiny galaxy shows that these black holes may have originated before the galaxies were ever formed,
which might explain the mysteries of its origins. But that's not exactly what we wanna talk about
today. Normally, we would anticipate these gigantic black holes to be in charge of, well,
basically preventing star formation. This is referred to as quenching. Star quenching
is when a massive black hole becomes active and stars devouring a star or a really massive cloud
of matter starts to fall into the black hole and then forms a really large accretion disk
giving birth to really large outflows astrophysical jets, as They are known to
come from both sides of the black hole, resulting in massive consequences such as galactic winds,
which travel over the whole galaxy, heating up the gas and inhibiting future star formation. This is
the broad explanation for why many active galaxies cease producing stars and end up being relatively
quiet for a long time until something else happens, for example, Another galactic collision,
or some other disruption, but that is not what is happening in our galaxy at all.
But that’s not what is happening in this galaxy at all. When this black hole became active,
it produced the exact opposite impact. Star formation appears to have been caused by the
actual streams emitted by the jets. That link is a gas outflow spanning across space like
an umbilical cord to a brilliant star nursery. When the low-velocity outflow came, the region
already had a thick cocoon of gas. According to Hubble spectroscopy, the outflow was traveling
at around 1 million miles per hour, striking into the thick gas and spreading out like a garden hose
slamming into a mound of dirt. Hubble determined the ages of newborn star clusters that dot the
route of the outflow's propagation. The Hubble images clearly show that the gas stretching in the
galaxy is definitely produced by the black hole in the center, with scientists even comparing it to
a kind of umbilical cord that appears to stretch from the black hole to the star-forming region,
which is somewhat symbolic in a sense because it appears to be the only black hole we know of
that is physically forming new stars through the emissions from its jets. Henize 2-10 is
only 30 million light-years distant, which is close enough for Hubble to clearly capture both
photos and spectroscopic evidence of a black hole outflow. The outflow was also surprising in that,
rather than inhibiting star formation, it was causing new stars to develop. But how precisely
is any of this occurring, and, more crucially, why aren't we seeing it in other galaxies?
Well, the explanation is most likely due to the power involved. Unlike other intense emissions,
such as those from quasars or other extremely powerful galaxies with huge black holes at
their centers, the power of the jets here is far lower. Even the material appears to be traveling
much slower, and so all of this material coming from the black hole is most likely hitting this
big reasonably thick cloud that previously existed here at speeds of approximately 500 kilometers per
second, rather than relativistic rates as would normally be the case. Also, the distance between
the star-forming cluster and the black hole is approximately 230 light years, implying that
this is occurring somewhat further away from the black hole itself, possibly far enough away not
to be affected by other things close to the black hole, but close enough and packed enough to remain
as a single cloud and not fly apart. So, because this particular black hole is not overly active or
massive, and also because it did not produce these extremely powerful emission effects,
all of this seems to imply that in some cases, rather than stopping star formation activity,
some black holes, if the conditions are just right, actually create more stars. For now
this is the only galaxy we know of where this is happening and it seems to be relatively rare
but chances are we're definitely going to be finding more of these and more importantly it
might even help us understand a little bit more about our own galaxy and our own central black
hole as well. For example, Recently, scientists definitely detected signals of star formation
occurring not far from the milky way’s core black hole 'Sagittarius A Star’, as well as indicators
of fairly medium size or medium power activity from the central black hole. There might be some
sort of connection which the scientists would want to explore. But the implications from this
study are intriguing and scientists are hoping to understand another mystery of our cosmos:
SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES. The creation of supermassive black holes remains a mystery; we
don't know if they began before matter solidified, potentially from some kind of primordial stuff
that existed early in the universe, or if they developed from a group of early stars.
Scientists believe that in the future, even more study will be devoted to dwarf galaxy black holes,
with the goal of exploiting them as clues to the puzzle of how supermassive black
holes formed in the early cosmos. Astronomers have been puzzled about it for a long time.
The link between the galaxy's mass and its black hole can give hints. The black hole in Henize
2-10 has a mass of around 1 million solar masses. Black holes in bigger galaxies can be more than a
billion times the mass of our Sun. The core black hole grows in size as the host galaxy
grows in size. There are three types of current ideas on the genesis of supermassive black holes:
1) they formed from the implosion of stars, just like smaller stellar-mass black holes, and somehow
gathered enough material to grow supermassive, 2) special conditions in the early universe
allowed for the formation of supermassive stars, which collapsed to form massive black hole "seeds"
right away, or 3) the seeds of future supermassive black holes were born in dense star clusters,
where the cluster's overall mass would have been enough to create them from gravitational collapse.
So far, none of these black hole seeding ideas has emerged as the dominant one. Dwarf galaxies,
such as Henize 2-10, provide interesting prospective clues since they have remained
tiny across cosmic time, rather than growing and merging like giant galaxies like the Milky Way.
Astronomers believe that dwarf galaxy black holes might be analogues for black holes in the early
universe, when they were just forming and growing. But by studying more about this intriguing galaxy
scientists hope to find more about the origins of supermassive balckholes and how they were formed.
It's poetic that an extremely creative black hole that defies laws about how black holes
are "supposed" to behave may actually aid scientists in unraveling the most ancient
of galaxy mysteries. One thing is sure, that the future scientific discoveries will be something
to keep your eyes fixed on. So what do you think about this strange blackhole? How will
this help us understand our origins? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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