Radio Telescopes Capture Best-Ever Snapshot of Black Hole Jets

[n2doc]

An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.

"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across -- less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. Radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days can be seen, making this the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made. The study will appear in the June issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is available online.

Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is located about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy.

more

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/radio-particle-jets.html

[mopinko]

1. i remember when black holes were the stuff of scifi.

that is a really cool picture.

[yodermon]

2. The phrase "erupting FROM" and "black hole" don't compute for me

but that's OK.

[mistertrickster]

3. It's counter-intuitive. But the model says that all the energy created can't be absorbed.

http://www.space.com/5285-powerful-black-hole-jet-explained.html

Ever since the first observations of these powerful jets, which are among the brightest objects seen in the universe, astronomers have wondered what causes the particles to accelerate to such great speeds. A leading hypothesis suggested the black hole's gigantic mass distorts space and time around it, twisting magnetic field lines into a coil that propels material outward.

Now researchers have observed a jet during a period of extreme outburst and found evidence that streams of particles wind a corkscrew path away from the black hole, as the leading hypothesis predicts.

[n2doc]

4. I think if something doesn't come in at the right angle/inclination

then these forces can shoot particles off along the axes. We use a version of this effect to accelerate spacecraft from one planet to the next (slingshot effect). Imagine being able to do so with a black hole!