Not Always
If you know anything about black holes (and you probably have at least heard that these bad boys suck up pretty much anything that wanders past their event horizons), then it might surprise you to learn that young stars can form near black holes. Now, this seems counter-intuitive, since, if the black hole is gobbling all the stuff up (including the stuff that makes stars), there wouldn’t be any (or at least enough) left to make stars.
Not so fast, says a team of astronomers and astrophysicists at the University of St. Andrews and University of Edinburgh in Scotland, U.K. It turns out that, through a set of computer simulations (left) of giant clouds of gas being sucked into black holes, the scientists have solved the mystery of how stars could be formed in the blustery, dangerous, and not completely hospitable environment near a black hole
The discovery of hundreds of high-mass young stars orbiting the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way was probably one of the most exciting in recent times. But, it begged the question of how they could have formed near the hungry maw of the black hole. And survived!
The series of images at left show the evolution of a 10,000 solar-mass molecular cloud falling toward a supermassive black hole. Although the cloud is disrupted by the black hole, some of the material is captured to form an eccentric disc that quickly forms numerous stars. The stars that form retain the eccentricity of the captured gas and those that form very close to be the black hole tend to be very massive. These results match the two primary properties of the young stars that have formed in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. They have high mass and they follow eccentric orbits around the supermassive black hole. Not only does this simulation set help us understand the black hole at OUR galaxy’s heart (and the formation of stars nearby), but they should be quite valuable when astronomers look to the hearts of other galaxies and find newborn stars orbiting close to the hungry maws of supermassive black holes.
Those lines of force hold the gas in place and help it resist the outward blasts from the core of the galaxy. They also keep the gas from clumping up to form newborn stars, making them a disruptive as well as a unifying force.