Black holes get a bad rep; they’re seen as hungry monsters that gobble up planets
and stars.
But NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found new evidence of a black hole creating stars
rather than destroying them!
Hubble recently captured images of gas launched by a black hole and slamming into a dense
cocoon of gas within a dwarf galaxy.
While black holes have monstrous gravitational pull, material falling in toward the black
hole can sometimes get redirected by magnetic fields into outflowing gas streams and jets.
The “outflows” of supermassive black holes in the center of larger galaxies are too fast
to allow star formation.
But the black hole of this dwarf galaxy is smaller, and its slower outflow compressed
the dense cocoon of gas enough to create new stars.
Dwarf galaxy black holes could serve as a comparison for black holes in the early universe,
when they were just beginning to form and grow.
While we don’t have all the answers, discoveries like this one set us on a path to understanding
more about the universe!