Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2024

46 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2024 ASTRO PUBLISHING for an explanation. “We don’t know what’s going on, but it’s just a very exciting finding,” said Alec Lessing of Stanford University, lead author of the paper published in The Astro- physical Journal. “This means there’s something missing from our under- standing of how black hole jets in- teract with their surroundings.” A nova erupts in a double-star sys- tem 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 hydro- gen that layer explodes like a giant nuclear bomb. The white dwarf isn’t destroyed by the nova eruption, which ejects its surface layer and then goes back to siphoning fuel from its companion, and the nova- outburst cycle starts over again. M87’s jet promotes stellar eruptions by NASA − Ray Villard I n a surprise finding, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Tele- scope have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet from a supermas- sive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. The stars, called novae, are not caught inside the jet, but apparently in a dangerous neighborhood nearby. The finding is confounding researchers searching