File:An Isolated Black Hole (Illustration) (52675793824).png

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This is an illustration of a close-up look at a black hole drifting through our Milky Way galaxy. The black hole is the crushed remnant of a massive star that exploded as a supernova. The surviving core is several times the mass of our Sun.

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Description	English: This is an illustration of a close-up look at a black hole drifting through our Milky Way galaxy. The black hole is the crushed remnant of a massive star that exploded as a supernova. The surviving core is several times the mass of our Sun. The black hole traps light due to its intense gravitational field. The black hole distorts the space around it, which warps images of background stars lined up almost directly behind it. This gravitational "lensing" effect offers the only telltale evidence for the existence of lone black holes wandering our galaxy, which may be a population of 100 million. The Hubble Space Telescope goes hunting for these black holes by looking for distortion in starlight as the black holes drift in front of background stars. Credit: FECYT, IAC For more information: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-001
Date	Taken on 7 February 2023, 13:54:07
Source	An Isolated Black Hole (Illustration)
Author	NASA Hubble
Flickr set InfoField	The Art of Hubble
Flickr tags InfoField	spacetelescope; cosmic; milkyway; cosmos; astronomy; blackhole; space; hubble; nasa; esa; hubblespacetelescope; science; universe; telescope

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This image was originally posted to Flickr by NASA Hubble at https://flickr.com/photos/144614754@N02/52675793824. It was reviewed on 7 July 2023 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.

7 July 2023

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Author	Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach
Image title	Captors of light, destroyers of worlds— no more. “Monstrous” black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. A black hole at the heart of the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up. The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy.A decade ago this small galaxy set off debate among astronomers as to whether dwarf galaxies were home to black holes proportional to the supermassive behemoths found in the hearts of larger galaxies. This new discovery has little Henize 2-10, containing only one-tenth the number of stars found in our Milky Way, poised to play a big part in solving the mystery of where supermassive black holes came from in the first place.“Ten years ago, as a graduate student thinking I would spend my career on star formation, I looked at the data from Henize 2-10 and everything changed,” said Amy Reines, who published the first evidence for a black hole in the galaxy in 2011 and is the principal investigator on the new Hubble research study, published in the [date] issue of Nature.“From the beginning I knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star forming region located 230 light-years from the black hole,” Reines said.That connection is an outflow of gas stretching across space like an umbilical cord to a bright stellar nursery. The region was already home to a dense cocoon of gas when the low-velocity outflow arrived. Hubble spectroscopy shows the outflow was moving about 1 million miles per hour, slamming into the dense gas like a garden hose hitting a pile of dirt and spreading out. Newborn star clusters dot the path of the outflow’s spread, their ages also calculated by Hubble.This is the opposite effect of what’s seen in larger galaxies where a supermassive black hole, engorged with infalling material, launches blazing jets of plasma moving at close to the speed of light. Gas clouds caught in the jets’ path would be heated far beyond their ability to cool back down and form stars. 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.“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. The additional surprise was that, rather than suppressing star formation, the outflow was triggering the birth of new stars,” said Zachary Schutte, Reines’ graduate student and co-author of the new study.Ever since her first discovery of distinctive radio and X-ray emissions in Henize 2-10, Reines has thought they likely came from a massive black hole, but not as supermassive as those seen in larger galaxies. Other astronomers, however, thought that the radiation was more likely being emitted by a supernova remnant, which would be a familiar occurrence in a galaxy that is rapidly pumping out massive stars that quickly explode.“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. A supernova remnant would not have that pattern, and so it is effectively our smoking-gun proof that this is ablack hole,” Reines said.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. It’s a persistent puzzle for astronomers. The relationship between the mass of the galaxy and its black hole can provide clues. The black hole in Henize 2-10 is around 1 million solar masses. In larger galaxies, black holes can be more than 1 billion times our Sun’s mass. The more massive the hostgalaxy, the more massive the central black hole.Current theories on the origin of supermassive black holes break down into three categories: 1) they formed just like smaller stellar-mass black holes, from the implosion of a star, and somehow gathered enough material to grow supermassive, 2) special conditions in the early universe allowed for the formation of supermassive stars, which collapsed to form massive black hole“seeds” right off the bat, or 3) the seeds of future supermassive black holes were born in dense star clusters, where the cluster’s overall mass would have been enough to somehow create them.So far, none of the black hole seeding theories has emerged to take the lead. Dwarf galaxies like Henize 2-10 are a promising potential clue, because they have remained small over cosmic time, rather than undergoing the growth and mergers of large galaxies like the Milky Way. Astronomers think that dwarf galaxy black holes could serve as an analog for black holes in the early universe, when they were just beginning to form and grow.“The era of the first black holes is not something that we have been able to see, so it really has become the big question: where did they come from? Dwarf galaxies may retain some memory of the black hole seeding scenario that has otherwise been lost to time and space,” Reines said.
Short title	Isolated Black Hole
Credit/Provider	FECTY and IAC
Headline	Black Hole Outflow Ignites Star Formation in Small Galaxy
Source	STScI
Usage terms	http://hubblesite.org/copyright/
Date and time of data generation	10 January 2022
Color space	sRGB
Exif version	2.31
Image width	1,877 px
Image height	1,052 px
Bits per component	8 8 8
Height	1,052 px
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Pixel composition	RGB
Number of components	3
Horizontal resolution	220 dpi
Vertical resolution	220 dpi
Contact information	outreach@stsci.edu http://hubblesite.org 3700 San Martin Drive Baltimore, MD, 21218 USA 410-338-4444
Keywords	Milky Way
Date and time of digitizing	07:58, 5 August 2021
Date metadata was last modified	03:49, 22 December 2021
File change date and time	08:24, 21 December 2021
Unique ID of original document	C48B723CEE243399DF6F5B2A2296629E

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