Incredible New Images From NASA’s Hubble Telescope Stun and Amaze Astronomers

Space as in outer space is an absolutely mesmerizing, confounding, beautiful, and  mysterious place. There's probably another million adjectives that could be used to describe it but even before humans started recording history, we've all been captivated by the sky and what secrets exist throughout the cosmos.

Over the course of thousands of years, many people have done incredible work to learn about space but despite all that time and the many discoveries, we still only have a knowledge and understanding of a small fraction of what is out there.

Amazing New Images from the Hubble

Recently NASA's Hubble Telescope peered deep into the vast void of outer space and collected images of something that has amazed astronomers and everyone that has seen it. The images are of a "blowtorch-like jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy".

What's equally as astounding as the image itself is the effect that this blowtorch-like jet is doing to the surrounding stars within its vicinity. While no stars are directly in the emissions path the stars called "novae" that are near it are literally erupting.

According to the report from NASA...

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 dwarf has tanked up a mile-deep surface layer of hydrogen that layer explodes like a giant nuclear bomb.

What then happens next is that the white dwarf is not destroyed by the eruption but instead will once again begin draining the hydrogen from its companion and then the whole process starts again.

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In this case with the black hole emission, what the Hubble observed was that twice as many novae were erupting around the area. According to the report, the beam that is being emitted from the black hole is about 3,000-light-years-long and travels through space at nearly the speed of light.

Scientific Response to New Hubble Images

The response from astronomers to these new images will tell you how incredible all of this is. According to the report, the images are "confounding" researchers as they search for an explanation.

Alec Lessing of Stanford University summed it up best in the article when he said...

We don't know what's going on, but it's just a very exciting finding...

Lessing would also add that despite not knowing what's going on now is not a bad thing. Rather it is an exciting thing because it means there's something missing from our current understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings. In other words, it's a new question for scientists and researchers to make an attempt at answering.

The report then goes to later detail that researchers ability to see this event is entirely because of the Hubble's unique capabilities and that currently the general idea is that roughly 100 billion galaxies exist throughout the visible universe and that means that every second that goes by, 1 million novae are erupting out there somewhere.

The same article also contains a wealth of other information regarding this anomaly, so we'd  encourage anyone to read that as well. Up above you will also see a video from NASA that goes on to further explain these latest sightings from the Hubble.