In a surprise finding, astronomers, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of M87, a huge galaxy 54 million light years away, seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory.
The stars, called novae, are not caught inside the jet, but in a dangerous area near it.
A nova erupts in a double-star system where an aging, swelled-up, normal star spills hydrogen onto a burned-out white dwarf companion star. When the white dwarf has collected a big enough layer of hydrogen, it explodes out into space.
