Do black holes help stars form?
Baku, February 4 (AZERTAC). The centre of just about every galaxy is thought to host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around them. They had been thought to hinder the birth of stars, but now an international team of astronomers studying the nearby galaxy. The team, led by Dr Stanislav Shabala of the University of Tasmania, Dr Mark Crockett of the University of Oxford, and Dr Sugata Kaviraj of Imperial College, London, publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In visible light, a prominent belt of dust can be seen running across the galaxy and when observed at X-ray and radio wavelengths it has jets extending for up to a million light years from a central black hole.
With WFC3, the scientists took a close look at the `inner filament`, a region located close to the outflow that is a source of ultraviolet and X-ray emission, as well as being bright in visible light. Using the Hubble images, the team was then able to map out the star formation history of the filament with unprecedented accuracy.
They found that the tip of the filament closest to the outflow contains young stars, the ages of which are similar to the time since the outflow `switched on` but that there are no young stars further up the filament. This is exactly what is expected from an outflow overrunning a cloud of gas sitting in its path.
The densest central parts of the cloud are compressed and collapse to form stars, while the gas on the outskirts is swept away from the tip of the filament, like a pile of autumn leaves in the wind.
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