According to Lead author Yuan Li, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science the bubble acts like teaspoon “that’s stirring the hot tea”.
The bubbles stir the stellar gas in a “bulk motion”, which creates smaller and smaller motions until the energy has converted into heat.
In their study, the astronomers dubbed the process “black hole-driven turbulence”.
Miss Li, who is a PhD candidate at Berkley, said: “In a turbulence mode there’s big eddies making little eddies making even smaller eddies. You’ve got a beautiful cascade.
She added: “I didn’t expect that, no one expected that.”
