The black hole was giving birth to stars in a nearby dwarf galaxy.
The study showed that black holes are not always the violent and destructive things they are usually known for. Instead, they seem to be able to form stars, not just eat them.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected such a black hole in the galaxy known as Henize 2-10, which is 30 million light-years away.
In addition to suggesting that black holes could be more productive than we realized, the new research may also help us understand where supermassive black holes originally came from.
Amy Raines, the researcher who published the first evidence of a black hole in the galaxy in 2011, was also the lead researcher on the new paper..
“From the beginning I knew that something unusual and special was going on at Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the relationship between the black hole and the neighboring star-forming region located 230 light-years away from the black hole,” she said.
A paper describing the results, “Star Formation Caused by a Black Hole in the Dwarf Galaxy Henize 2-10”, was published today in temper nature.
In large galaxies, material falling toward the black hole is torn apart by magnetic fields, resulting in explosions of plasma moving nearly the speed of light. Any gas cloud captured in that plane would be so heated up to form stars at all.
The black hole in the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is smaller, but the material that flows from it flows more gently. This means that the gas has been compressed the right way to help form stars, not prevent them from doing so.
“Only 30 million light-years away, Henize 2-10 is close enough that Hubble was able to capture images and spectral evidence of the black hole’s outflow very clearly. An additional surprise was that, rather than suppressing star formation, the outflow was causing the birth of new stars, said Zachary Schott, a graduate student at Rains and lead author of the new study.
The new black hole study by Hubble could also help provide better details about how these supermassive black holes form. Because they’ve remained small, it can provide a picture of what other black holes – now larger – looked like when they were younger, and how they might form and grow.
“The era of the first black holes isn’t something we’ve been able to see, so it really becomes the big question: Where did they come from? In a statement, Raines said that dwarf galaxies may retain some memory of a black hole seeding scenario that would otherwise have been lost in time and space.