The Hubble Telescope Just Discovered A Black Hole Creating Stars!

 

Black holes are the Darth Vaders of the universe evil entities that gobble up even light itself and from which no escape is possible born before death they are the invincible consequences of Einstein's theory of gravity and the

 comfortable laws of physics are turned on their heads if you get too close to one Stephen Hawking in his classic a brief history of time described the spaghettification that a celestial wanderer would experience as their bodies and very molecules will be pulled apart and stretched in this wretched one-sided encounter thus the narrative of the cosmic boogeyman goes but turns out it's not so simple after all and it's our old reliable Hubble space telescope that is turning our conventional wisdom about black holes inside out welcome the fact nominal in today's article we plunge into the role of the black hole as pro-gender of life rather than harbinger of death and destruction and the evidence is clear black holes are much less one-dimensional than we ever realized if you want to see a black hole tonight tonight just look in the direction of sagittarius the constellation that's the center of the milky way galaxy and there's a raging black hole at the very center of that constellation that holds the galaxy together the words of theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku reflect just how accepted the existence of black holes in our universe has become but this was not always the case just over a century ago as world war 1 raged around the planet Albert Einstein published his revolutionary theory of general relativity among the many gravitational mysteries solved that made Einstein a scientific celebrity was a bizarre movement by the planet mercury that could not be explained by the gravity of the sun or other planets a new interior planet Vulcan was even proposed in the 19th century to explain the shift in mercury's orbit

 general relativity took care of that

 but from it sprang such novel ideas as the expanding universe and black holes and just to be clear these revolutionary concepts were far from universally accepted even by Einstein in 1939 Einstein concluded in the annals of mathematics that support for black holes was not convincing and they existed only in theories not in the real world my how times have changed Cygnus x1 was the first black hole discovered way back in 1964 three whole years before the term black hole was ever used ten years later evidence was still shaky enough that the two leading black hole physicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne placed a bet on whether Cygnus x1 was actually a black hole it took until 1990 for hawking to concede with 100 certainty that it was indeed the entity that Einstein both predicted and rejected for the record their wager was a subscription to an adult magazine since then about

 50 black holes have been discovered by

 inferring their existence from studying the properties of normal stars that they orbit and we expect there to be some 10 million scattered through our milky way alone

 in 2019 astronomers were able to capture the first ever images of a supermassive black hole m87 found at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy and now astronomers have direct evidence that these formerly cold-hearted villains these mausoleums of cosmic matter are in fact

 also capable of actually feeding the birth of whole new stars a nurturing black hole who knew the black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe the only elements in their construction are our concepts of time and space astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar expressed admiration for these misunderstood cosmic wonders and now there's more reason to approach them with awe much of our newest discovery of the widely varied effects of black holes is thanks to Dr Amy Raines assistant professor in the department of physics at Montana State university it was her work 11 years ago as a graduate student that first pointed to a massive black hole in dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 some 34 million light years away and believed to be a quite young addition to the family of galaxies from the beginning i knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10 and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star-forming region reigns now says other astronomers had suggested that what her team detected was instead the work of a supernova but that counter theory has been put to rest now reigns is the principal investigator on the new Hubble observations published in January 2022 in the journal nature and while astronomers have seen enormous black holes ripping apart stars as well as feeding dense clouds for star formation in large galaxies seeing the cosmic umbilical cord in such a young and small galaxy is something new and what they are seeing is spectacular a tendril of gas from the galactic heart of Henize 2-10 some 490 light years long has an electrically charged ionized gas ejecting at 1.1 million miles per hour and into a dense cloud of gas that is in effect a nursery for newborn stars a cocoon Hubble's amazing resolution clearly shows a corkscrew-like pattern in the velocities of the gas which we can fit to the model of a precessing or wobbling outflow from a black hole a supernova remnant would not have that pattern and so it is effectively our smoking gun proof that it is a black hole explains rings the effect of this supercharged spray from Henize 2-10's black hole is startling the dense gases that the outflow feeds into are then spread out in all directions and filling them are newborn star clusters baby stars Montana State astrophysicist Zachary Schutte notes that this discovery is a first for galaxy so young and small before our work supermassive black hole enhanced star formation had only been seen in much larger galaxies Schutte also says that while researchers would like to study more examples of this phenomenon systems like Henize 2-10 are not common and obtaining high quality results is difficult however Hubble was able to capture not only images but spectroscopic evidence of the black hole's outflow clearly just imagine what the James Webb space telescope may tell us about this marvelous discovery supermassive black holes exist at the center of most if not all galaxies and most often they spew superheated jets of material at almost light speed gas clouds that encounter these intensely hot sprays are unable to cool enough to form stars but not so with the kinder and gentler black hole of Henize 2-10 if material is being released at a much slower rate and the collision with the dense gas cloud is fortunate to create the right conditions for starburst a kind of goldilocks zone for cradling baby stars astronomers hope to study dwarf galaxies further to help understand how the first seeds of supermassive black holes not only formed but evolved through our universe's history black holes aren't as black as they are painted they are not the eternal prisons they were once thought to be things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly another universe so if you feel you were in a black hole don't give up there's a way out feel free to test Stephen Hawking's observation of these wonders but i prefer to take his word for it so what do you think about this incredible

 discovery of the nurturing nature of what are undoubtedly the universe's most fearsome and yet misunderstood citizens with Webb and soon roman getting ready to unlock cosmic doors

 what would you most like to discover

 about our universe tell us in the comments