Re: Radio telescopes capture black hole in mid-belch
- From: al Guacamole <aet@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:29:46 -0700 (PDT)
On Apr 24, 8:19 am, Florida <demeter547op...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yahoo! Newshttp://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080424/sc_nm/blackhole_dc
Radio telescopes capture black hole mid-belch
By Julie Steenhuysen
2 hours, 20 minutes ago
Using powerful radio telescopes, scientists have captured a
supermassive black hole just as it was belching out a jet of
supercharged particles, offering a first look at how these cosmic jets
are formed, they said on Wednesday.
Supermassive black holes form the core of many galaxies and
astronomers have long believed they were responsible for ejecting jets
of particles at nearly the speed of light.
But just how they did it had remained a mystery.
An international team of researchers led by Alan Marscher of Boston
University just got its first peek.
Marscher's team aimed the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very
Long Baseline Array -- a system of 10 radio telescopes -- at the
galaxy BL Lacertae.
A kind of supermassive black hole known as a blazar was suspected of
spewing out a pair of forceful streams of plasma some 950 million
light years from Earth.
A light year, the distance light travels in a year, is about 6
trillion miles.
What they saw was a close up of this charged material winding in
corkscrew fashion out of the supermassive black hole, behaving just as
astronomers had predicted.
"We have gotten the clearest look yet at the innermost portion of the
jet, where the particles actually are accelerated," Marscher, whose
study appears in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
"It helps us understand how these objects are able to accelerate
particles up to the near velocity of light," said University of
Michigan astronomy professor Hugh Aller, who worked on the project.
A black hole is a concentration of mass so dense that little can
escape its gravitational pull. Aller said in a telephone interview
that as objects fall into the black hole, others get shot out at very
high velocities.
But the trick is capturing enough data at the right time to study how
this works.
"We never know when these objects will go off. It depends on when the
object falls into it," Aller said.
He said the acceleration process is similar to the output of a jet
engine. "We think it is focused by a nozzle of sorts and it comes out
at us."
____________
(Editing by Maggie Fox and Todd Eastham)
© 2008 Reuters
Interesting article. IIRC there are some theories of a strong magnetic
caused by the collapsing matter, which is sucked into the hole, and
which follows a rotating black hole. Hence the particles are
following a spiral course of the rotating field along the magnetic
field. So neutal matter which is sucked becomes ionized along the way
and is ejected by the pressure on the ionized particles.
.
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