GRS 1915+105 is at it again
Many years ago I made a post about how weird the stellar black hole GRS 1915+105 is.
Well, now there is another potential way it is weird...it might be forming stars.
See that curved feature up there? That's a bow shock, created when the black hole's jet impacts the gas between the stars.
In the middle of the bow shock is an infrared source that most likely is a dense cloud of gas with massive stars forming inside.
The jet carves cavities in the gas between the stars. This could potentially reduce the amount of gas that is available for star formation. But at the front of the jet, gas is compressed, potentially causing it to collapse and fragment into stars.
This sort of process has been observed many times in supermassive black holes.
But now I realize feedback from stellar black holes might also be important. So crazy.
Citation: Motta, S. E., Atri, P., James, Matthew H., et al. 2025, Astronomy and Astrophysics, article ID A222
The figures are Fig 1, Fig 2, and Fig 3 from this paper.
The paper can be found here: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025A%26A…696A.222M/abstract
