The Hubble visible-light image shows a dwarf galaxy with young stars. The bright region at the center is surrounded by pink clouds and dark dust lanes and indicates the location of the giant black hole and active stellar nurseries. Credit is given to NASA, ESA, and Amy Reines (XGI).
Black holes are often described as the monsters of the universe, tearing apart stars, consuming anything that comes too close, and holding light captive. The Hubble Space Telescope shows that a black hole is fostering rather than suppressing star formation. The Hubble images show a gas outflow stretching from the black hole to a bright star birth region, triggering the already dense cloud into forming clusters of stars. A black hole in a dwarf galaxy could be the same as a black hole in a larger galaxies. The question of how the first seeds of black holes formed and evolved over the history of the universe may be answered by further study of dwarf galaxies.
Black holes are often portrayed as monsters that hold light captive, but in the Hubble Space Telescope's latest research, they are less villainous. The black hole at the center of the dwarf galaxy is creating stars instead of taking them up. New star formation is being caused by the black hole. The dwarf galaxy is located in the southern constellation Pyxis.
A decade ago this small galaxy set off a debate about whether dwarf galaxies were home to black holes similar to those found in larger galaxies. This new discovery has little Henize 2-10, containing only one-tenth the number of stars found in our Milky Way, poised to play a big part in solving the mystery of where supermassive black holes came from.
Ten years ago, when Amy was a graduate student, she looked at the data from Henize 2-10 and realized that she would spend her career on star formation.
"From the beginning, I knew something 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 located 230 light-years from the black hole," he said.
The outflow of hot gas from the central region of the dwarf galaxy is connected to the black hole and the star-forming region. The relationship between the black hole and the young stars is shown by the data on the outflow from the black hole. The outflow of hot gas slammed into the dense cloud of a stellar nursery and spread out like water from a hose impacting a mound of dirt a million years ago. The path of the spread of young stars is revealed by the alignment of clusters of young stars. Credit is given to NASA, ESA, and Amy Reines (XGI).
That connection is an outflow of gas stretching across space. The region was already home to a lot of gas. The outflow was moving at 1 million miles per hour, slamming into the dense gas like a garden hose hitting a pile of dirt. Newborn star clusters dot the path of the outflow's spread.
This is the opposite effect of what is seen in larger galaxies, where material falling toward the black hole is whisked away by surrounding magnetic fields, forming blazing jets of plasma moving at close to the speed of light. Gas clouds caught in the jets' path would be too hot to cool down. With the black hole in Henize 2-10, gas was compressed enough to cause new star formation.
Hubble was able to capture both images and evidence of a black hole outflow when it was 30 million light-years away. The new study found that the outflow was triggering the birth of new stars rather than suppressing them.
Since her first discovery of radio and X-ray emissions in Henize 2-10, she has thought they may have come from a massive black hole, but not as massive as those seen in larger galaxies. The radiation was thought to be coming from a supernova remnant, which would be a familiar occurrence in a galaxy that is rapidly pumping out massive stars that quickly explode.
We can fit the model of a precessing, or wobbling, outflow from a black hole withHubble's amazing resolution. The pattern that a supernova remnant would have is not the same as a black hole.
The Dwarf starburst galaxy Henize has a compass. Credit is given to NASA, ESA, and Amy Reines (XGI).
With the aim of using dwarf galaxy black holes as clues to the mystery of how supermassive black holes came to be in the early universe, Reines expects more research to be directed at them in the future. It's a challenge for astronomy. Clues can be provided by the relationship between the mass of the galaxy and its black hole. There is a black hole in Henize. Black holes can be more than 1 billion times the mass of the sun. The central black hole is larger if the host galaxy is massive.
There are three different theories on the origin of super black holes: 1) they formed just like smaller stellar-mass black holes, from the implosion of stars, and somehow gathered enough material to grow supermassive, 2) special conditions in the early universe allowed for the formation of super, and
Black hole seeding theories have not taken the lead so far. Over the course of time, dwarf galaxies like Henize 2-10 have remained small, rather than undergoing the growth and mergers of large galaxies like the Milky Way. Astronomers think that dwarf galaxy black holes could be an example of a black hole in the early universe.
The era of the first black holes is not something that we have been able to see, so it really has become the big question: Where did they come from? The black hole seeding scenario that has been lost to time and space may be retained by dwarf galaxies.
There is more information about the star formation in the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10). There is a DOI of 10.1038/s41586-021-04215-6.
Nature journal information.
The Hubble Telescope has found a black hole that ignites star formation in a dwarf galaxy.
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