Black hole jet appears to boost rate of nova explosions
The intense electromagnetic environment near a black hole can accelerate particles to a large fraction of the speed of light and sends the speeding particles along jets that extend from each of the object's poles. In the case of the supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies, these jets are truly colossal, blasting material not just out of the galaxy, but possibly out of the galaxy's entire neighborhood.
But this week, scientists have described how the jets may be doing some strange things inside of a galaxy, as well. A study of the galaxy M87 showed that nova explosions appear to be occurring at an unusual high frequency in the neighborhood of one of the jets from the galaxy's central black hole. But there's absolutely no mechanism to explain why this might happen, and there's no sign that it's happening at the jet that's traveling in the opposite direction.
M87 is one of the larger galaxies in our local patch of the Universe, and its central black hole has active jets. During an earlier period of regular observations, the Hubble Space Telescope had found that stellar explosions called novas appeared to be clustered around the jet.
