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Biggest ever seen black hole jets; blasting plasma well beyond their own galaxy
- wglb 2y agoThe referenced paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07879-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07879-y
- topherPedersen 2y agoWhat happens to the plasma that the black hole spits out? Do they have any ideas?
- ziofill 2y agoI think it just blasts off into the universe
- actionfromafar 2y agoPanspermia?
- tejtm 2y agoslows, cools, condenses into us sometimes
- antognini 2y agoI studied these objects for my first research paper in grad school. (You can see a few images of some of the objects I found in Figure 3 of my paper [1]) In essence the jet blows a hot bubble into the gas that comprises the intracluster medium of the galaxy cluster. Over time synchrotron radiation causes the bubble to cool down and eventually (maybe on the order of a few 100 million to a billion years if I recall right) the bubble comes into thermal equilibrium with the surrounding gas. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.3896 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.3896
- LarsDu88 2y agoIf the plasma jet is wildly larger than our entire galaxy, I wonder if some sort of exotic life could evolve inside the jet. Some sort of life that would be totally rare in the universe.
- Retr0id 2y agoSometimes I wonder if our whole universe is some kind of transient aberration, if you zoom out far enough
- killthebuddha 2y agoif you zoom out far enough, there's no other option (imo)
- steve_adams_86 2y agoWe are little critters living in space squirts
- LarsDu88 2y agoFor all we know, we live inside some large scale invisible jet and our entire understand of physics is really the exception rather than the rule
- jadbox 2y agoNot my field, but could the Big Bang have been a massive black hole that "spat" out jets of plasma that formed into new stars and galaxies? I call this the black hole big burp theory.
- bobbylarrybobby 2y agoThis seems incompatible with inflation
- jadbox 2y agoIsn't universe inflation already on shaky ground though? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-inflation-theory-faces-challenges/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-inflation-...
- southernplaces7 2y agoI thought that only hawking radiation could escape a black hole. Now a paper describing a vast jet of emitted plasma?? The article doesn't quite clarify this point. It mentions the jets shooting from below and above the black holes, but does this mean they're emerging from their interior or being created by the accretion of superheated material that forms in orbit around black holes? The article simple states this, which seems wrong given the immense gravity of black holes: >When supermassive black holes become active—in other words, when their immense forces of gravity tug on and heat up surrounding material—they are thought to either emit energy in the form of radiation or jets. So the holes themselves emit energy jets or their accretion disks do? Sloppy damn phrasing and reporting, and all too common for science subjects.
- maxnoe 2y agoHawking radiation is one process, but for spinning black holes, especially ones with accretion disks and magnetic fields around them, there are two more theoretical predictions: the Blandford–Znajek process and the Penrose process. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet#Rotation_as_possible_energy_source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet#Rotation_a...
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- codeulike 2y agoIts not coming out of the black hole itself, its more like the black hole has an accretion disk around it of material that is being sucked in. The dynamics of the huge forces and energies involved can cause jets to form, throwing high energy particles away from the black hole. The jets still represent a tiny fraction of the matter, most of which is still heading into the hole.
- njarboe 2y agoAnd crazy strong and twisted magnetic fields that will heat things up/create large forces on charged particles.
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- kamalamomala 2y ago[flagged]
- imranq 2y agoThe jets are 23 million light years in length! That's 140 milky way galaxies laid out -- these are sizes I can't even begin to comprehend
- illesteggplant 2y agoPretty crazy!
- ZoomZoomZoom 2y agoImagine a one meter long jet. Congratulations, you've begun to comprehend it and now are at 1/(2.176 × 1023) of the total length.
- wruza 2y ago10^23 is actually easy to comprehend, because it’s close to the amount of h2o molecules in a syringe. Just that many meters.
- takinola 2y agoImagine the amount of energy required to create a jet that large! The scales are so big, it makes me wonder if there isn’t an upper limit to energy density. How much energy can be in one spot before you inadvertently create a Big Bang?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> it makes me wonder if there isn’t an upper limit to energy density Yes, in a sense. The point at which the energy bends space-time into a black hole.
- doctorwho42 2y agoActually, in theory there is one place denser but our models show it can never happen. The moment right after the big bang. As energy can never be created nor destroyed, all the energy in the universe was practically in one point in space-time a femtosecond after the big bang.
- njb311 2y agoVery exciting until they figure out the jet is just a Starlink satellite passing in front of the telescope.
- rookderby 2y agoOne hell of a thruster.
- klyrs 2y agoJust think... in the presence of a constant magnetic field, this could be the most powerful particle collider in the visible universe
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoI’ve seen stellar engines [1] show up in fiction. Has anyone done a galactic engine? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
- svieira 2y agoJohn C. Wright in the Count to the Escaton sequence. But it's just part of the background of awesome while the real people story plays out in the foreground (as it should)
- thehappypm 2y agoI have a question about black holes, HN. Let’s say you have a black hole. You fire a laser beam straight into it. Just by symmetry, shouldn’t it blueshift on the way in, gain some preposterous amount of energy — enough that it can escape?
- karpierz 2y agoLight travels in a straight line - black holes don't "pull" light in, they change what a straight line looks like in the space around it. The event horizon is the distance where all straight lines lead to the black hole.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> shouldn’t it blueshift on the way in, gain some preposterous amount of energy — enough that it can escape You're devilishly close to the Penrose process by which "energy can be extracted from a rotating black hole" [1]. (You can also make them explode [2].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_bomb
- kadoban 2y agoIt will gain energy. There _is_ no amount of energy it could gain to escape though. It goes no faster, gets no closer to escape. It just splats into the black hole and we'll never see it again no matter how much energy it started with or gained.
- thehappypm 2y agoFrom an outside observer, the black hole is finite in width though, though. and if the speed of light is constant, isnt that a contradiction? Or is a black hole somehow of infinite width?
- kadoban 2y agoIt's not a contradiction because the path of the light enters the black hole event horizon but does not come back out. All paths end at the ~center of the black hole. We don't really know what's there, at the so-called singularity at the center, it may be impossible to know. But it's probably something that light can hit and stop existing, or even if it can't it'll be stuck there in some way or another. We know that the gravity (warping of spacetime) around a black hole is such that it cannot escape, even at light speed. What happens inside is less sure, but largely moot because none of it can ever affect anything outside of the event horizon ever again. (Hawking Radiation or something else may make this technically a lie, but it's close enough to the truth to last a few trillion years)
- ustad 2y agoIs it possible for these jets to hit other galaxies/stars/planets?
- mystified5016 2y agoYes. A poweful enough quasar can halt star formation in nearby galaxies by blasting away free gas. Most quasars emit enough gamma radiation to sterilize all of space within a hundred lightyears or so.
- lencastre 2y agoAnd to think that we witness this from the comfort of our pocket sized terminals makes me happy, but also sad that maybe mankind will not reach spacefaring… great filter and all… dunno