Temperature of Black Hole Jet Exceeds Expectations, Shatters Scientific Theory

Somewhere near the star Spica in Virgo, there is a quasar called 3C 273. It's the closest and thus brightest quasar we can see from Earth - that's saying alot since the object is 2.4 billion light-years away. But recent observation of the quasar has revealed an astonishing fact: the temperature of its black hole jet is 10 trillion Kelvin... a whopping 2 order of magnitude higher than what theoretical models predicted.

“This result is very challenging to explain with our current understanding of how relativistic jets of quasars radiate,” said lead author Yuri Kovalev of the Moscow’s Lebedev Physical Institute in a statement.

news.discovery.com...

The mainstream theory predicted that electrons in the jet would cool through interaction with the electromagnetic radiations there, and so the jets could reach no higher than 100 billion K. But observations have just falsified this theory.

The mystery deepens.

My personal opinion? I think we might be observing evidences of physics beyond the Standard Model. Compositeness of leptons, anyone?

a reply to: swanne

Bye bye Hawking Radiation ?

Interesting .. Given this is all I know about blackholes I never thought they would have temperature

ordinary gravity has become so extreme that it overwhelms all other forces in the Universe. Once inside, nothing can escape a black hole's gravity — not even light.

hubblesite.org...

EDIT:

Eh I don't get it at all

It all comes down to what is known as the firewall paradox for black holes.
The central feature of a black hole is its event horizon.
The event horizon of a black hole is basically the point of no return when approaching a black hole.
In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the event horizon is where space and time are so warped by gravity that you can never escape.
Cross the event horizon and you are forever trapped.
This one-way nature of an event horizon has long been a challenge to understanding gravitational physics.
For example, a black hole event horizon would seem to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
One of the principles of thermodynamics is that nothing should have a temperature of absolute zero.
Even very cold things radiate a little heat, but if a black hole traps light then it doesn’t give off any heat. So a black hole would have a temperature of zero, which shouldn’t be possible.
Then in 1974 Stephen Hawking demonstrated that black holes do radiate light due to quantum mechanics. In quantum theory there are limits to what can be known about an object.
For example, you cannot know an object’s exact energy.
Because of this uncertainty, the energy of a system can fluctuate spontaneously, so long as its average remains constant.
What Hawking demonstrated is that near the event horizon of a black hole pairs of particles can appear, where one particle becomes trapped within the event horizon (reducing the black holes mass slightly) while the other can escape as radiation (carrying away a bit of the black hole’s energy). While Hawking radiation solved one problem with black holes, it created another problem known as the firewall paradox.
When quantum particles appear in pairs, they are entangled, meaning that they are connected in a quantum way.
If one particle is captured by the black hole, and the other escapes, then the entangled nature of the pair is broken.
In quantum mechanics, we would say that the particle pair appears in a pure state, and the event horizon would seem to break that state. Artist visualization of entangled particles.
Credit: NIST. Artist visualization of entangled particles.
Credit: NIST. Last year it was shown that if Hawking radiation is in a pure state, then either it cannot radiate in the way required by thermodynamics, or it would create a firewall of high energy particles near the surface of the event horizon.
This is often called the firewall paradox because according to general relativity if you happen to be near the event horizon of a black hole you shouldn’t notice anything unusual.
The fundamental idea of general relativity (the principle of equivalence) requires that if you are freely falling toward near the event horizon there shouldn’t be a raging firewall of high energy particles.
In his paper, Hawking proposed a solution to this paradox by proposing that black holes don’t have event horizons.
Instead they have apparent horizons that don’t require a firewall to obey thermodynamics.
Hence the declaration of “no more black holes” in the popular press.

Ok I am so confused right now, will read on, interesting thread

But what we're looking at now happened how long ago ?

a reply to: realnewsrealfunny

The jet of the black hole has a temperature of 10 trillion degrees Kelvin. The OP is about the jet of the black hole, not the black hole itself (which is supposed to have infinite temperature).

originally posted by: scubagravy
But what we're looking at now happened how long ago ?

Well, it's 2.4 billion light years away, so 2.4 billion years ago.

a reply to: swanne

What in the world is a jet of a black hole ? Sorry I am dumb but I like quantum mechanics, and all this stuff the black hole thing interests me since they talked about the collider, so I am all ears

Infinite temperature ? What in he world ?

And 2.4 billion years away ok mmm wows

originally posted by: realnewsrealfunny
a reply to: swanne

What in the world is a jet of a black hole ?

That's the million dollars question, mate. Nobody really knows.

All that we know is that black holes emit jets. The exact mechanism is still a topic of investigation.

originally posted by: realnewsrealfunny
a reply to: swanne

What in the world is a jet of a black hole ? Sorry I am dumb but I like quantum mechanics, and all this stuff the black hole thing interests me since they talked about the collider, so I am all ears

Infinite temperature ? What in he world ?

And 2.4 billion years away ok mmm wows

Best answer to that question so far was

originally posted by: theultimatebelgianjoke
a reply to: swanne

Bye bye Hawking Radiation ?

a reply to: SprocketUK
A plumber from New Jersey , who taught himself physics , said goodbye to Hawking's Radiation Theory years ago. Even Hawking himself stated he had been wrong

a reply to: Gothmog

I just had a Google to see if there was any big story debunking it, but everything on page one of Google is supportive of it.

The only backtracking I can see by Hawking, was his repudiation of an earlier assertion that all information entering a black hole will be irretrievably destroyed.

a reply to: SprocketUK

Science isn't instantaneous. New data has arrived, different research teams around the world will analyse the data and try and come up with new models that accommodate the new data. That takes time.

a reply to: GetHyped

Surely if this plumber debunked it years ago it should be pretty high on the search results when you Google hawking radiation theory wrong?

a reply to: swanne
How about galaxies are born, live out their cycle and 'die', all their stars consumed by the black hole at their core.

But the immensity of the mass of hundreds of millions of stars becomes even too much for the singularity to contain and it shines like a gynormous sun. Some close ups of these objects would be awesome.

How hot is hot? How many stars in one are we talking about?

originally posted by: Gothmog
a reply to: SprocketUK
A plumber from New Jersey , who taught himself physics , said goodbye to Hawking's Radiation Theory years ago. Even Hawking himself stated he had been wrong

The bad boy of physics Lennard suskind . love him. He has a way of explaining physics so the layman can understand.

a reply to: SprocketUK

Did this plumber publish their hypothesis and supporting data? It's one thing to claim you've proved someone wrong with no supporting evidence but actually doing it is something else entirely.

For example: "Quantum entanglement is wrong!"

That statement counts for nothing. If it turns out later on that QE is wrong because someone actually managed to demonstrate it through experiment and careful analysis, that doesn't lend any credibility or substance to my empty argument.

a reply to: swanne
You're sensationalizing a bit my friend with the "Shatters Scientific Theory" title. The title of the article you linked to only says "Black Hole Jets Hotter Than Expected" and says it's hard to explain but it doesn't necessarily shatter theory.

Here's a paper from 2006 talking about some possible solutions to this so-called "Synchro-Compton Catastrophe" or "Inverse Compton Catastrophe":

The inverse Compton catastrophe and high brightness temperature radio sources

The occurrence of the inverse Compton catastrophe when the synchrotron brightness temperature exceeds a threshold value, usually estimated to be 10^[12] K, appears to be in contradiction with observation because: (i) the threshold is substantially exceeded by several intra-day variable radio sources, but the inverse Compton emission is not observed, (ii) powerful, extra-galactic radio sources of known angular size do not appear to congregate close to the predicted maximum brightness temperature. We re-examine the parameter space available to synchrotron sources using a population of monoenergetic electrons, in order to see whether the revised threshold temperature is consistent with the data. The electron distribution and the population of each generation of scattered photons are computed using spatially averaged equations. We confirm our previous finding that intrinsic brightness temperatures T_[rm B]~10^[14] K can occur without catastrophic cooling. We show that substantially higher temperatures cannot be achieved either in transitory solutions or in solutions that balance losses with a powerful acceleration mechanism. Depending on the observing frequency, we find strong cooling can set in at a range of threshold temperatures and the imposition of the additional constraint of equipartition between particle and magnetic field energy is not warranted by the data. Postulating a monoenergetic electron distribution, which approximates one that is truncated below a certain Lorentz factor, gamma_[min], alleviates several theoretical difficulties associated with the inverse Compton catastrophe, including those mentioned above.

I don't know what kind of feedback they got from that paper but that abstract makes it sound like maybe it's not such a catastrophe if the assumptions are changed.

Also the original paper for the article you cited doesn't make it sound like they authors think new physics is needed if you read the abstract, at least I don't get that impression:

Extreme Brightness Temperatures and Refractive Substructure in 3C273 with RadioAstron

Earth-space interferometry with RadioAstron provides the highest direct angular resolution ever achieved in astronomy at any wavelength. RadioAstron detections of the classic quasar 3C273 on interferometric baselines up to 171,000 km suggest brightness temperatures exceeding expected limits from the "inverse-Compton catastrophe" by two orders of magnitude. We show that at 18 cm, these estimates most probably arise from refractive substructure introduced by scattering in the interstellar medium. We use the scattering properties to estimate an intrinsic brightness temperature of 7*10^12 K, which is consistent with expected theoretical limits, but which is ~15 times lower than estimates that neglect substructure. At 6.2 cm, the substructure influences the measured values appreciably but gives an estimated brightness temperature that is comparable to models that do not account for the substructure. At 1.35 cm, the substructure does not affect the extremely high inferred brightness temperatures, in excess of 10^13 K. We also demonstrate that for a source having a Gaussian surface brightness profile, a single long-baseline estimate of refractive substructure determines an absolute minimum brightness temperature, if the scattering properties along a given line of sight are known, and that this minimum accurately approximates the apparent brightness temperature over a wide range of total flux densities.

The 18cm wavelength is the one where temperature exceeds expectations and the authors seem to be suggesting that "these estimates most probably arise from refractive substructure introduced by scattering in the interstellar medium" and as far as I know this refractive substructure does not require any "physics beyond the Standard Model" as you suggest so I don't know why you're suggesting that, maybe you should read the paper?

originally posted by: GetHyped
a reply to: SprocketUK

Did this plumber publish their hypothesis and supporting data? It's one thing to claim you've proved someone wrong with no supporting evidence but actually doing it is something else entirely.

For example: "Quantum entanglement is wrong!"

That statement counts for nothing. If it turns out later on that QE is wrong because someone actually managed to demonstrate it through experiment and careful analysis, that doesn't lend any credibility or substance to my empty argument.

Kinda my point...

Stupid questions for those in-the-know:

Is the event horizon where time stops?

Is it possible that beyond it time moves backwards?

originally posted by: 123143
Stupid questions for those in-the-know:

Is the event horizon where time stops?

Is it possible that beyond it time moves backwards?

The event horizon is the lip of the waterfall, the point at which you can't get back out no matter how much power you have.
Dunno about time stopping though, I think it depends on where the man with the watch is standing.