Matter Falling Into Black Holes Emit Tremendous Visible Light, UV, and X-rays

www.sciencedaily.com...

Matter falling into black holes emits tremendous amounts of energy which can escape as visible light, ultraviolet light and X-rays. This energy can also drive outflows of gas and dust far from the black hole, affecting the growth and evolution of galaxies containing the black holes.

I never knew light is emitted by the matter that falls into black holes. Pretty interesting stuff.

Though light cannot escape from black holes themselves, black holes with accretion disks -- which are swirling clouds of matter about to enter the black hole -- are among the most luminous objects in galaxies. By studying how the radiation and accretion disk interact, astrophysicists can learn much about the extreme gravitational fields, magnetic forces and radiation processes close to these black holes.

"The rapid accretion phase releases a lot of energy, not only in radiation, but also in outflows that drive gas out of a galaxy, which can shut off star formation and hold back the growth of the galaxy," said Ballantyne, a scientist in Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.

Wow! Thats very interesting. Hold back the growth of the galaxy?

I just gotta say, the universe never ceases to amaze me. (most of this stuff I never knew before)

I love all this stuff .. very fascinating ..

I was having a discussion with CLPrime in this thread ... he explained a bit of what you just mentioned to me in this, and other posts:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Originally posted by buni11687
www.sciencedaily.com...

Most of this was already known, but the one piece of news (to me) in the article you didn't quote so I'll quote it here:

the relationship we saw between the ionization and rate of accretion was different from what the theory predicted."

That's the key finding that wasn't expected, as the models predicted a cubic relationship but they found a linear relationship.

But as they say, you can't run tests on black holes in a test tube, so it's not surprising to find our models need some work due to the lack of laboratory experiments.

The thing that makes it interesting, is that some black holes may not be all that "black" if they have a significant accretion disk, that is sending out plenty of energy.

The black holes without an accretion disk have to be a lot harder to find, because, those really are "black" to a larger degree.