New images from the Hubble space telescope have found a supermassive blackhole to be “resting,” creating an environment so peaceful that stars are now forming from the gas remaining around the blackhole.
According to the Hubble Website, a supermassive blackhole located at the center of the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, which is located 300 million lightyears away from us, is exhibiting some behavior that is rather strange. It is not longer swallowing stars and dust — as is par for the course for blackholes — and it is now doing quite the opposite: creating new stars.
At the center of every galaxy is a supermassive blackhole. The one at the center of NGC 4889 is massive — 21 billion times the mass of the Sun. The supermassive blackhole at the center of the Milky Way is believed to only be about four million times as massive as the Sun.
NGC 4889’s supermassive blackhole worked by the process of hot accretion. Its gigantic gravitational pull would ensure gas, dust, and other space debris slowly fell inward toward the blackhole, creating an accretion disc. The disc was made of the material, heated to millions of degrees, that was being pulled in by the blackhole’s gravity.
The accretion disc sustained the blackhole’s “appetite” until its supply of nearby galactic material exhausted. After that, it entered a period of “resting” were it is no longer pulling in huge amounts of galactic material at a time.
Instead, it is now sitting dormant. The once chaotic environment around the blackhole is now so peaceful that stars are beginning to form around it — something that would have been unheard of during its activity.