Black holes are best known for ripping stars apart, but new observations of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way show that it’s actually helping stars form. Until now, scientists had disagreed about the origin of a collection of massive stars orbiting less than a light-year from our galaxy’s central black hole, which scientists call Sagittarius A*. The stars were first seen by infrared telescopes.The new finding, based on observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, confirms the theory that black holes can help form massive stars and gives more support to the idea that black holes play a big role in galaxy formation.“In one of the most inhospitable places in our galaxy, stars have prevailed,” said study co-author Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester. “It appears that star formation is much more tenacious than we previously believed.”Astronomers still need to figure out how the process works.

Many had expected the high-speed movement of material near the black hole would prevent star formation.Either the immense disk of gas that orbits the black hole helps fuel the creation of new stars – what scientists call the disk model – or it may serve as a nursery for a cluster of lost stars in a process called the cluster migration model.In the disk model, the gravity within the dense disk of gas that surrounds Sagittarius A* offsets the gravitational tug from the black hole and allows stars to form. As high-speed jets of radiation blast out of the black hole, they send a supersonic shockwave through the gas cloud, which compresses and heats the gas. The shockwave also ionizes the gas by taking away some of its electrons.

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