Hubble findet heraus, dass der Strahl eines Schwarzen Lochs Sternausbrüche fördert

tl;dr: The astrophysical jet from the M87* SMBH is shooting across space over thousands of lightyears, and that jet appears to cause an increase in the rate of “small” thermonuclear explosions on the surfaces of white dwarf stars with companions (aka: “novae”). This doesn’t appear to be just a coincidence but currently there is no seemingly workable hypothesis to explain the mechanism for it working.

Some ideas they evaluate in the paper:

* Maybe the jet is pushing the interstellar medium in a way that compresses it into “packets” that then increase the accretion rate of nova producing bodies. Or perhaps this compression causes heating of donor stars and increases the rate of mass transfer.
* Maybe the jet heats up donor stars and increases mass transfer rates (there doesn’t seem to be enough heating possible to make this happen though, by orders of magnitude)
* Maybe the jets cause an increase in star formation rates which leads to a higher rate of nova events (but that doesn’t account for the lack of novae along the counterjet)