The Hubble Space Telescope photographed the flying spaghetti monster

This is the galaxy NGC 1275, the black hole in the center of which shoots gas filaments in all directions. This gas is missing in the galaxy and prevents the formation of new stars

Long-lived magnetic fields manage to maintain a vast web of spaghetti-like gas filaments around a black hole. This is what researchers claim in a study published last week in the journal Nature. Previously, it was still unclear what kept these delicate filaments from dissipating due to competing gravitational forces. The black hole resides at the core of a large galaxy, NGC 1275 which itself lies near the center of a large galaxy cluster known as Perseus.

When the black hole pulls in gas from the stars around it, it ignites jets of matter that produce bubbles made up of energetic particles in the gas surrounding the black hole. As these bubbles grow and expand, the gas cooling from NGC 1275's core stretches into long tendrils and leaves a long trail, like the streaks left behind by balloons.

Until now, no one was sure how old these gas filaments are or how they avoid being torn apart by the cluster's immense gravity, says Andrew Fabian of the University of Cambridge in the UK. However, in his research he used the Hubble Space Telescope and managed to obtain the most detailed image of the galaxy so far, and the situation changed.

The researchers from Cambridge showed that these gas filaments are woven from several thin filaments. These fuses are so thin that the magnetic fields are the only thing that can protect them from breaking apart, Fabian said.

The stabilization effect

The magnetic fields that originate in NGC 1275's black hole stretch into these filaments because they exert an influence on the charged particles—protons and electrons—in the gas in the filaments. The length of a typical fuse is about 20 thousand light years, and the filaments erupt from the area to a distance of 300 thousand light years. Based on their speed it seems that their life span was about 100 million years.

Fabian and his colleagues calculated that these wires are strengthened by magnetic fields that are only 0.01% stronger than the magnetic fields on Earth. These fields are strong enough to prevent the gas in these wires - whose temperature reaches several hundred degrees Celsius - from evaporating into the sauna at a temperature of 40 million degrees in the gas surrounding them.

The magnetic fields can not only prevent the strings from being torn apart by gravitational forces, but also stabilize the gas and prevent it from collapsing and forming stars. This process of preventing star formation may help solve an open problem in cosmology: why astronomers see far fewer massive galaxies than models predict, says Patrick Ogle of Caltech.

Astronomers believe that some massive galaxies fail to grow further because they contain at their core a black hole like the one at the center of the galaxy NGC 1275, which devours its surroundings and spews jets of gas. These jets heat the gas in the galaxy and cause it to spread into space, and therefore they starve the galaxies and do not provide them with the material necessary to create stars.

However, if some galaxies channel the gas to these filaments and prevent the formation of new stars, this mechanism stops the growth of the galaxy. "This may explain why these galaxies are not getting bigger than they are today," Ogle said.

to the notice of the researchers