Supermassive black holes have the same masses as up to a billion suns or more and have been detected at the center of many large galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
The plasma jets spotted in M84 are actually coming from the ring of gases and dust—called the accretion disk—that spirals into the galaxy's supermassive black hole, feeding its growth.
But as M84's bubbles expand, they prevent gases in the accretion disk from cooling and clumping together to form new stars or from sinking toward the center of the galaxy and into the black hole.
If galactic black holes did not disrupt their own intake from time to time like this, they would continually gain mass, and their borders—or event horizons—would creep ever outward.
"If you can eject energy from the central black hole, you can solve two problems at the same time: You can starve the black hole and also heat the gas so that stars will not be forming as efficiently," Ruszkowski told National Geographic News.
The research is detailed in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
Kevin Schawinski, an astrophysicist at Yale University who was not involved in the paper, said that "the really fascinating aspect of this [discovery] is that they see evidence of this happening repeatedly in the same galaxy, demonstrating that this is a periodic process."
It's still unclear, however, why the plasma jets are released at regular intervals.
One idea is that it takes time between each outburst for enough gas to cool and settle onto the black hole's accretion disk to trigger another outburst.
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