Black hole 'blowtorch' is causing nearby stars to explode, Hubble telescope reveals

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a gigantic "blowtorch-like" jet blasting out of a black hole — and it seems to be causing nearby stars to explode.

The 3,000-light-year-long trail of flaming plasma is beaming out from a supermassive black hole with a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun in the center of the galaxy M87.

Getting caught in this beam would be deadly for any cosmic object, but according to new observations, even being in its vicinity can be devastating. The superheated energy beam appears to be causing nearby star systems to erupt in explosions called novas. Yet exactly why this is happening remains a mystery.

"We don't know what's going on, but it's just a very exciting finding," study lead author Alec Lessing, an astrophysicist at Stanford University, said in a NASA statement. "This means there's something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings."

The researchers published their findings Aug. 14 on the pre-print server arXiv, so it has yet to be peer-reviewed.

Related: Biggest black hole jets ever seen are as long as 140 Milky Ways

Supermassive black holes typically sit at the centers of galaxies, sucking in matter from their surroundings before spitting it out at extreme speeds, thus creating a feedback process that shapes how galaxies evolve. As material approaches a black hole's "mouth," friction causes it to heat up and emit light trillions of times more luminous than the brightest stars that can be detected by telescopes. Occasionally, active black holes funnel this infalling matter into gargantuan energy jets that spew into space, sometimes spanning entire galaxies.