Black hole is spotted 'giving birth' to stars in a nearby dwarf galaxy - Daily Mail

A black hole has been spotted 'giving birth' to stars in a nearby dwarf galaxy – suggesting the voids aren't as violent as previously thought, NASA has revealed.

But new evidence from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 that's creating stars, not gobbling them up.  .

The black hole is apparently contributing to a 'firestorm' of new star formation that's taking place in Henize 2-10, which is 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pyxis.

A Hubble Space Telescope image shows the Henize 2-10 galaxy, with a hidden supermassive black hole at its centre.

A pullout of the central region of dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 traces an outflow, or bridge of hot gas 230 light-years long, connecting the galaxy's massive black hole and a star-forming region.

'At only 30 million light-years away, Henize 2-10 is close enough that Hubble was able to capture both images and spectroscopic evidence of a black hole outflow very clearly,' said Schutte.

The black hole in Henize 2-10 is around 1 million solar masses.

Hubble imaging and spectroscopy of Henize 2-10 show a flow of plasma (ionised gas) 'like an umbilical cord' that stretches from the black hole.

The distance separating the black hole and the star formation region at the edge of the dwarf galaxy is still hefty to the human mind – about 230 light years – but less so in astronomical terms. ?

But with the less-massive black hole in Henize 2-10, and its gentler outflow, gas was compressed just enough to precipitate new star formation. 

In 2011, a team of researchers including Reines first looked at galaxy Henize 2-10 and tried to explain its behaviour. 

At the time, Henize 2-10 sparked debate among astronomers as to whether dwarf galaxies were home to black holes proportional to the supermassive black holes found in the hearts of larger galaxies. 

But data from Hubble – which is still operational despite NASA's recent launch of the more powerful James Webb telescope – unequivocally shows a black hole, according to Reines

'Hubble's amazing resolution clearly shows a corkscrew-like pattern in the velocities of the gas, which we can fit to the model of a precessing, or wobbling, outflow from a black hole,' she said.  

Now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighbouring star forming region located 230 light-years from the black hole.'  

Reines expects that even more research will be directed at dwarf galaxy black holes in the future, with the aim of using them as clues to the mystery of how supermassive black holes came to be in the early universe