Black hole collides blobs of plasma

Astronomers have witnessed two vast blobs of plasma, shot out by a black hole, cannoning into each other in a nearly light-speed cosmic collision.

The supermassive black hole sits at the heart of the sixth-brightest galaxy in our sky, NGC 3862.

It blasts out a jet of plasma at 98% of the speed of light - and within that jet, one particularly fast-moving knot of material bore down on another in a dazzling impact.

The discovery was made using a series of images, compiled in this video, which were snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope and span 20 years.

It is reported in the journal Nature.