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Scientists have seen black holes in a dwarf galaxy that can cause star formation.
Black holes that are millions to billions of times larger than the sun are at the center of most large galaxies. Sagittarius A* is 4.5 million solar masses in size and is located at the heart of the Milky Way.
Black holes have shredded stars before. Researchers have found black holes that can create powerful outflows that can feed dense clouds.
The dwarf galaxy's black hole causes star formation.
There are black holes in the universe.
A Hubble Space Telescope image of a dwarf galaxy. The image was taken by NASA/ESA/Zachary Schutte.
Evidence for black hole-driven star formation in dwarf galaxies was scarce. Dwarf galaxies are similar to newborn galaxies that may have looked like after the dawn of the universe, so investigating how supermassive black holes in dwarf galaxies can spark the birth of stars may offer a glimpse of how young galaxies in the early universe formed a portion of their stars.
The dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is located 34 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Pyxis. The dwarf galaxy has a mass ten times that of the sun, according to recent estimates. The Milky Way has a mass of about 1.5 trillion.
A decade ago, a senior author at Montana State University discovered radio and X-ray emissions from a dwarf galaxy that suggested it had a black hole. The radiation may have come from the remnant of a star explosion.
In the new study, the researchers focused on a tendril of gas from the heart of Henize 2-10 that is flowing as fast as 1.1 million mph. The outflow was connected to a bright nursery about 230 light-years from the core of Henize 2-10.
The outflow slammed into the dense gas of the stellar nursery like a garden hose, leading water to spread outward. The newborn star clusters were found to be 100,000 times the mass of the sun.
A closer look at the central region shows a black hole and hot gas. The image was taken by NASA/ESA/Zachary Schutte.
The scientists used high-resolution images from the Hubble Space Telescope to detect a corkscrew-like pattern in the gas outflow. The models suggested that it was due to the precessing of a black hole. Since a supernova remnant wouldn't cause such a pattern, it's possible that Henize 2-10's core is home to a black hole.
Schutte said that before their work, star formation had only been seen in larger galaxies.
The researchers would like to investigate more dwarf galaxies with similar black hole-triggered star formation. Schutte said that systems like Henize 2-10 are not common and that obtaining high quality observations is difficult. He noted that we will have new tools to search for these systems when the James Webb Space Telescope comes online.
The findings were detailed in the January issue of Nature.
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