Most powerful black hole blast discovered

"We discovered the most energetic quasar outflow ever seen, at least five times more powerful than any that have been observed to date

The central black hole is estimated to be a thousand times more massive than the one in the Milky Way.

Love discoveries like this it puts the scale of the universe on a whole different level when will it end

Black hole

Excuse my ignorance but Black holes suck everything in, not even light can escape right?. So how come we can see all that matter escaping from the black hole. Just curious.

Tony

reply to post by Ferryman


I was thinking that same thing lol

Black holes suck material toward them, but some of it gets spit out rather than swallowed. Many black holes eject jets that move away from the accretion disk at nearly the speed of light. These jets have been observed most spectacularly from the centers of nearby galaxies (for example, M87) but also appear in microquasars - in quick, enormously energetic spurts and sputters, as if someone had taken a video of a quasar jet and pressed the fast-forward button.

The processes by which these jets are formed are not well understood, but seem to require magnetic fields - whose presence causes instabilities in the accretion disk that allow material to fling upwards - as well as rapidly rotating black holes, which can feed some of their energy to the magnetic field and to the jet material itself.

reply to post by wellsybelieves


Thank you for explaining it Wellsybelieves.

Astronomers have spotted an enormous black hole - the second most massive ever - but it resides in a tiny galaxy.

The galaxy NGC 1277, just a quarter the size of our own Milky Way, hosts a black hole 4,000 times larger than the one at the Milky Way's centre. A report in Nature shows it has a mass some 17 billion times that of our Sun.

www.bbc.co.uk...

Originally posted by Ferryman
Excuse my ignorance but Black holes suck everything in, not even light can escape right?. So how come we can see all that matter escaping from the black hole. Just curious.

Tony

Black holes make the material around them spin very fast as they are being sucked in by the black hole's gravity. However, some of that material spinning around the black hole is NOT within the "event horizon", which is the distance away from the black hole that nothing (not even light) can escape.

It is believed that this disk of material spins around so quickly that it becomes super-hot due to friction, and it emits x-ray jets from the top and bottom of the disk. These jets are also outside the "event horizon", so they can escape the black hole's gravity.