Astronomers from China have been taken aback by a discovery that could fundamentally change science's current understanding of how black holes form and project jets of matter.

The discovery, which the astronomers say "challenges canonical theories of jet formation," came while they were visiting Spain and the U.S. to use the Great Canary Telescope, and Hawaii's Keck Observatory respectively. They were there to monitor a black hole in the M81 galaxy, which is located hundreds of millions of light-years away from Earth.

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To their surprise, they observed the presence of relativistic jets in an ultraluminous supersoft X-ray source (ULS).  

"Such relativistic jets are not expected to be launched from white dwarfs," the astronomers wrote in a report published in the science journal Nature. "And an origin from a black hole or a neutron star is hard to reconcile with the persistence of M81 ULS-1's soft X-rays."

Relativistic jets are powerful jets of plasma that can reach close to the speed of light, and are emitted near the central massive objects of some active galaxies, notably radio galaxies and quasars. While acknowledging that "the formation of relativistic jets by an accreting compact object is one of the fundamental mysteries of astrophysics," past observations of relativistic jets have led to a well-established phenomenology.

"Most of astronomers didn't expect black holes to produce supersoft X-ray spectra by gobbling matter," Liu Jifeng, a professor at CAS and a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories under CAS, who led the research team, told state media.

"And they believed relativistic jets would only be produced by sources with soft, or low-energy, X-ray spectra or hard, high-energy, X-ray spectra."

TagsAstronomers’ Startling Discovery Challenges Black Hole Emission Theory, Chinese astronomers, keck observatory, Great Canary Telescope, ultraluminous supersoft X-ray source, science journal nature, relativistic jets, M81 galaxy, Chinatopix, Astronomy, Black Holes