Black holes are a mystery. They are large, mighty, and the energy that comes from their swirling cloaks can impact the landscape of nurseries and graveyards of stars in the nearby galaxies.
Even with masses close to billions of suns, the peculiar objects are insignificant in the vast galactic core, thus making a recent discovery of how far their power can reach that more impressive.
A team of astronomers and astrophysicists from across the globe found traces that the supermassive black holes in the hearts of numerous galaxies not only impact the nearby star distribution, but also affect those of nearby galaxies too!
Archival data from nearly 125,000 satellite galaxies circling tens of thousands of heavier masses helped the team identify a relationship between the amount of new stars being born in an orbiting cluster and its position.
Annalisa Pillepich, an astronomer from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, stated:
“Surprisingly we found that the satellite galaxies formed more or fewer stars depending on their orientation with respect to the central galaxy.”
Dust and gas gathered into the extreme gravity of supermassive black holes glow with intense radiation and also get reduced to a high-velocity plasma blur that even generates magnetic fields, thus hurtling off particles at impressive velocities.
Though astronomers keep on trying to figure out the processes that are implied in determining the fate of certain galaxies, Pillepich and her fellow mates decided to go even further with the observations.
They used models of specific physical processes to simulate galaxy formations.
“Just as with the observations, the Illustris-TNG simulation shows a clear modulation of the star formation rate in satellite galaxies depending on their position with respect to the central galaxy,” said Pillepich.
