Why Some Supermassive Black Holes Have Big Jets

astroengine writes "Some of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies have powerful jets blasting from their poles, and others have weak jets, but many don't have jets at all. Why is this the case? In new simulations carried out by astronomers at NASA and MIT, it would appear that the way in which the black hole spins relative to its accretion disk may be a contributing factor. Strangely enough, the results indicate that if the black hole rotates in the opposite direction to its accretion disk, the most powerful jets form. The region between the black hole event horizon and the accretion disk still baffles scientists, so these simulations are very speculative, but the results seem to match what radio astronomers are seeing in the cores of active galaxies. Perhaps it's time to fire up that event horizon telescope!"

Comments

Re:Here's a silly question

[Anonymous Coward]

They increase in mass, yes but does their size increase?

Yes, there is a direct relationship between the radius of the event horizon and the mass-energy within the event horizon. More massive or more energetic black holes have broader event horizons. This is observer dependent and subject to a Lorentz contraction, so if you are accelerating directly towards a black hole it will appear more massive (and thus have a larger radius) than if you are accelerating directly away from the same black hole; this effect increases exponentially as (absolute) relative velocity increases towards c.

When any observer sees mass-energy crossing into the event horizon, the event horizon's radius increases proportionately. Again an observer's measurement of that mass-energy is subject to a Lorentz contraction.

There is also an inverse relationship between the surface area of the black hole and its temperature; both are subject to the same Lorentz contraction, but more massive black holes emit photons similarly to colder blackbody radiators than less massive black holes.

Where does the matter go if it's all compressed to a singularity?

We have no useful theory about what's going on the inside of an event horizon.

There are several ways to consider the microscopic states inside a black hole from a thermodynamics-meets-General-Relativity perspective. Here's one. In GR (and we have tested this), the lower the gravitational potential in which a clock is, the slower it ticks, for any form of clock (including naturally oscillating processes). Ignoring observers experiencing acceleration other than via gravitation, the gravitational potential is very high in inter-galactic-cluster space (i.e., farrrr away from dense mass-energy), lower inside solar systems, lower still on planetary surfaces, very low inside stars, and extremely low inside black holes. Consequently, a "clock" ticking inside a black hole will, from the perspective of someone with a high gravitational potential, tick very slowly. The "clock" itself, however, will always tick at its natural rate, from its perspective and the perspective of anything immediately near by it, unmoving, and at the same gravitational potential.

So from our perspective on Earth, a natural oscillator inside an event horizon will go from oscillating at, say, several GHz, to oscillating less than once every several billion years of our time.

From its perspective our clocks on Earth will speed up by the same factor.

However, where things get strange is where the gravitational potential changes in distances shorter than the wavelengths of protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, and so forth, since they are ultimately oscillating "clocks". If "part" of a proton is in a higher gravitational potential than the rest of it, how do the quarks and gluons within it behave? What happens to the proton? And so forth.

That requires a consistent unified theory of gravitation and quantum mechanics, which nobody has been able to demonstrate yet.

Are all the atoms just spaghettified, stacked one on top of the other in some infinitely tall, infinitely narrow well?

Electrons, Protons, and Neutrons obey Fermi-Dirac statistics for fermions. Spatially, this means that you can't stack them all in one place - there is a pressure separating fermions from one another. When you introduce pressure from, for example, gravitation in a heavy star, it overwhelms the fermionic pressure and creates "degenerate matter". Neutron stars have degenerate phases including neutrons formed by squashing together electrons and protons. Quark stars may exist, and would have degenerate phases formed by squashing together heavy (i.e., full of neutrons) atomic nuclei. Pressures at and inside an event horizon would almost certainly lead to some further degenerate phase, and we have no idea what happens then.

(We can somewhat reproduce some