NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed a powerful jet coming from supermassive black hole at the core of the massive M87 galaxy that is seemingly causing stars to erupt along its trajectory. The stars, also known as novae, are not captured inside the jet, but rather in a dangerous neighborhood nearby.
What you’re seeing here is a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma shooting out from M87’s 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole. Astronomers using Hubble discovered twice as many of these novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the galaxy during a 9-month-long survey. The galaxy is home to several trillion stars and thousands of globular star clusters. In comparison, the Milky Way is estimated to have between 100 and 400 billion stars.
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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. 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,” said Alec Lessing, lead author from Stanford University.
