Hubble is once again proving its worth. A brand new video shows as Hubble captures a collision at high speeds in the center of a black hole. The collision was so fast that astronomers actually missed it. It wasn’t until they pieced together a time-lapse of several frames that the Hubble had captured.
Hubble Captures a Collision within Black Hole Stream
The galaxy is about 260-million light years away from Earth and it’s the one that this supermassive black hole resides in. Eileen Meyer, a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland was one of the scientists who witnessed the explosion. This collision was the first to be caught on film in an extragalactic jet. Scientists now have the opportunity to see how energy was produced by the collision because Hubble captures a collision of these objects.
When objects fall into a black hole they travel very fast, heating up and they begin to eject a plasma stream or extragalactic jet. However, it is hypothesized that if the movement of the matter falling in is uneven, it creates knots of matter within the plasma stream. The matter moves at different speeds, but all at more than the speed of light. It is believed that a fast knot rear-ended a slower one. These knots are usually ejected from gravitationally compact objects. It is rare for scientists to be able to observe the motion with optical telescopes.
Hubble Captures Images in Ultraviolet
The ultraviolet images from the Hubble captures a collision shows the heart of the M87 galaxy. The jet was seen blasting out in a rather clumpy and sloppy way. One of the knots changed its brightness and increased so much it had blasted ninety times more energy than the black hole has inside it. Scientists believe that another explanation for the collision could be a wandering cloud of gas drifting into the jet and being slammed by particles, which started heating up and pouring out high energy light.
Magnetic Fields Keep Jet Narrow
The magnetic fields that focus the jet compress and squeeze material into the beam, causing it to glow and travel at more than seven times the speed of light. These are theories as to what happened and what caused the explosion of brightness, but no one knows for sure. All is known that the Hubble captures an explosion that would have otherwise been missed by the naked eye and given astronomers something very exciting to study.
