A wobbling jet from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy is blasting gas out at a rate high enough to suppress star formation. The discovery reveals that even low-power black hole jets can dramatically reshape entire galaxies.
Some galaxies contain active galactic nuclei, extremely bright and energetic regions fueled by matter falling into a supermassive black hole at the center. These powerful cores can launch narrow jets that push surrounding gas outward, changing how and where new stars are able to form. This process has now been clearly observed in a nearby active galaxy called VV 340a by Justin Kader and his colleagues.
A Multi Telescope View of a Wobbling Jet
To capture the full picture, the team studied VV 340a across infrared, optical, radio, and sub millimeter wavelengths. Their observations combined data from the James Webb Space Telescope, the Keck II telescope, the Jansky Very Large Array, and the Atacama Large Millimeter submillimeter Array (ALMA). By pairing these observations with detailed modeling, the researchers found that the galaxy’s relatively weak radio jet does not travel in a straight line. Instead, it slowly traces out a cone as it moves away from the black hole, a motion known as precession.
Gas Blown Out at a Star Shaping Scale
As the jet travels outward, it heats and strips electrons from nearby gas, forcing large amounts of material out of the galaxy. The team estimates that this process is ejecting gas at a rate of 19.4 ± 7.9 solar masses per year. According to the researchers, that level of gas loss is high enough to influence how many new stars the galaxy can form, showing that even low power black hole jets can have a major impact on their cosmic surroundings.
Reference: “A precessing jet from an active galactic nucleus drives gas outflow from a disk galaxy” by Justin A. Kader, Vivian U, Loreto Barcos-Muñoz, Marina Bianchin, Sean T. Linden, Yiqing Song, Gabriela Canalizo, Archana Aravindan, George C. Privon, Tanio Díaz-Santos, Christopher Hayward, Matthew A. Malkan, Lee Armus, Rosalie C. McGurk, Jeffrey A. Rich, Anne M. Medling, Sabrina Stierwalt, Claire E. Max, Aaron S. Evans, Christopher J. Agostino, Vassilis Charmandaris, Tianmu Gao, Justin H. Howell, Hanae Inami, Thomas S.-Y. Lai, Kirsten L. Larson, Christopher D. Martin, Mateusz Matuszewski, Joseph M. Mazzarella, James D. Neill, Nikolaus Z. Prusinski, Raymond Remigio, David B. Sanders and Jason Surace, 8 January 2026, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.adp8989
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