A Supermassive Black Hole Nourishes Baby Stars Far, Far Away

 Supermassive black holes are mysterious entities that lurk hungrily in the hearts of probably every large galaxy in the observable Universe, where they hide in sinister, voracious secret, waiting for their dinner to come swirling down to their waiting maws. These in-falling buffets may consist of destroyed stars, clouds of disrupted gas, or any other unfortunate celestial object that has been wrecked by the big black hole's gravitational snatching claws. Once a doomed object has passed the fatal point of no return, referred to as the event horizon, it can never return from the lair of this gravitational beast, and it is lost to the rest of the Universe forevermore. But, despite their bad reputation for being mercilessly destructive, one supermassive black hole that haunts the heart of a galaxy far, far away, has shown itself to have a nurturing character. This object has a maternal heart, and is aiding in the birth of bright new baby stars that are more than one million light-years away. One light-year is equal to 6 trillion miles.


The discovery of this motherly heart of darkness, that has managed to spark the births of stars over a mind-boggling distance--as well as across multiple galaxies--was made by astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. If confirmed, the black hole would represent the widest reach ever observed for such an object behaving as a nurturing stellar mother, kick-starting star-birth. This maternal heart of darkness has actually enhanced star formation.


"This is the first time we've seen a single black hole boost star birth in more than one galaxy at a time. It's amazing to think one galaxy's black hole can have a say in what happens in other galaxies millions of trillions of miles away," commented Dr. Roberto Gilli in a November 26, 2019 Chandra Observatory Press Release. Dr. Gilli is of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and is lead author of the study describing the discovery.


Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore"


Supermassive black holes are greedy entities that weigh-in at millions to billions of times more than the mass of our Sun. Our own Milky Way Galaxy plays host to just such a gravitational beast, that resides in its secretive heart. Our resident supermassive black hole is named Sagittarius A*, and as supermassive beasts go, it is of relatively low mass. Sagittarius A* (pronounced saj-a-star) weighs a "mere" millions--in contrast to billions--of solar-masses. Our Milky Way's dark heart is quiet now. It is an elderly beast, and it awakens only occasionally to feast on an unfortunate celestial object that has wandered too close to where it waits. Even though it is mostly dormant, when both Sagittarius A* and the Universe were young, it dined greedily, and glared brightly, as a quasar. Quasars are the brilliantly glaring accretion disks encircling active supermassive black holes haunting the centers of galaxies.





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