When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Quasar J0742+2704 (center) became a subject of interest after it was discovered to have a newborn jet blasting from the disk around its supermassive black hole. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Kristina Nyland (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory) The Hubble Space Telescope image you see above is from last year, and it showcases several galaxies that inhabit a pocket of our universe roughly 5.94 billion light-years away from us. Astronomers, however, have been particularly intrigued by what isn't visible in the image, but rather only "seen" through radio emissions. Blasting from the central galaxy — home to a black hole more than 400 million times our sun — is a powerful jet that could provide fresh clues about how galaxies and their black holes evolve in tandem over eons. First, however, we need to figure out where this jet in the Hubble Telescope image came from in the first place. Jets like these are known to erupt from elliptical galaxies that have been sculpted through chaotic mergers with other galaxies — such mergers are the key to funneling gas and dust toward gargantuan black holes lurking at the centers of galaxies and fueling the jets even further. But astronomers scrutinizing this particular Hubble image found the central galaxy actually sports a swirl of spiral arms seemingly unruffled by any such merger, raising new questions about what might have triggered its jet. "At first, I thought I completely messed up during our research," Olivia Achenbach of the United States Naval Academy told reporters on Monday (Jan. 13) at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Maryland. "Because it's such a large supermassive black hole at the center, we'd predicted we'd see an elliptical galaxy." You may like