Black Hole Emits a 1,000-Light-Year-Wide Gas Bubble

PhrostyMcByte writes "12 million light-years away, in the outer spiral of galaxy NGC 7793, a bubble of hot gas approximately 1,000 light-years in diameter can be found shooting out of a black hole — one of the most powerful jets of energy ever seen. (Abstract available at Nature.) The bubble has been growing for approximately 200,000 years, and is expanding at around 1,000,000 kilometers per hour."

Comments

It wasn't the black hole...!

[Braintrust]

...Sirius did it!

The Magical Planet

[Kingrames]

You eat just ONE bean-shaped planet...

Re:The Magical Planet

[Alcoholist]

...and no other galaxy wants to be in the room.

very minor issue

[Lazareth]

A minor issue with the headline (of both the summary and the article) is that the black hole does not really emit the gas bubble per se. It is emitting jets of extremely fast moving particles which then hits nearby interstella gas. Obviously this causes an increase in temperature, creating a "snowball" effect resulting in the aforementioned 1000-light-year-wide (flaming) gas bubble.

How can a black hole emit anything?

[Unoti]

I'm sorry if this is a really dumb question, but how can a black hole emit much of anything? I thought they couldn't emit light, any anything else, not even information.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Rene S. Hollan]

No, but the combination of gravity and magnetism means they can whip up a lot of stuff outside the event horizon and direct it outward along the poles.

Further, stuff that does fall in adds it's angular momentum to that of the hole, and a spinning black hole has both an inner and outer event horizon. Stuff can fall through one and still escape the other, IIRC, removing angular momentum from the hole.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[InterGuru]

The phraseology in the article is misleading. The energy and gas jets are emitted as matter falls towards the black hole and becomes superheated from the falling. Once the matter crosses the boundary ( event horizon ) into the back hole itself it disappears from the rest of the universe.

Information is released, but very very slowly.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[sexconker]

They can emit Hawking radiation.

Basically, pairs of particles appear out of nowhere for extremely brief amounts of time, fly around a bit, then collide together and disappear again.

(Yes, this happens. Matter appears out of nowhere and then disappears again.)

If this pair of particles pops into existence just outside the event horizon of a black hole, there's a chance that, in their brief flying about, one will cross the event horizon and the other will not. Since they're no disjoint, they don't disappear like they normally do.

The particle that is on the outside of the event horizon escapes as Hawking radiation.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[blair1q]

Not so much emit as throw away, as a fat kid does with the a wrapper around a candy bar.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[jdb2]

An inner and outer event horizon? last I checked the event horizon was the point at which nothing not even light escapes. By that definition theres only one event horizon. If something goes in and is able to come out, it obviously hasn't entered the event horizon. I assume what you are talking about is the gravitational swing effect by which an object enters the gravitational field long enough to gain speed before it is slingshots away before being sucked in.

I think he's talking about the ergosphere.

jdb2

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[DragonWriter]

I'm sorry if this is a really dumb question, but how can a black hole emit much of anything? I thought they couldn't emit light, any anything else, not even information.

The dominant theoretical model of black holes has them emitting energy (Hawking radiation).

Though I don't think the effect here is really the black hole emitting anything (from within the event horizon), but an instead an effect that occurs because of gravitational compression outside the event horizon.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[DragonWriter]

I love how people talk about black holes like they know how they work.

It always amazes me that both laymen and scientists as well talk about such things as if we KNOW whats going on.

We don't. We have theories.

In science, its important to remember that a "theory" is not the same thing as the loose definition of a theory in casual conversation, or some technical but non-scientific contexts (literary criticism, I'm looking at you.)

In science, a theory is a hypothesis whose predictions which make it falsifiable have withstood testing and which remains viable. The casual-conversation concept of "theory" as an plausible but unverified idea about the world is what in science would be a conjecture or a hypothesis, not a theory.

So, often, we talk about theories (as opposed to mere conjectures or hypotheses) as if they were known except in very particular contexts where there theoretical nature is particularly important (such as in the case of a conflict between two theories that have both withstood scrutiny but where the predictions each makes in conditions impractical to test conflict.) But there's a good reason for that: if it is a "theory" as the term is used in science, it has demonstrated it power in explaining behavior beyond that which was consulted to formulate it. It may need to be refined, but its known to be a useful model.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Randle_Revar]

No, antimatter does not have antimass. And it is 50/50 as to which of the pair falls into the black hole. But for that formerly virtual particle to now exist as a "regular" particle it's energy has to come from somewhere, and in this case, "somewhere" is the black hole. I believe that this is one of those points where to go further, you need to get into the actual math.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Abcd1234]

Acting as if theories are somehow more than the current best guess(es) of the scientific method is throwing out the skepticism that is the core of said method.

Oh please, you're no better than the original poster. While you accuse the original poster of overstating the rigor of scientific theories, you massively understate it by bringing them down to the level of mere guesses. Of course, as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but don't delude yourself into thinking that your position is at all superior to that of the OPs. You're simply taking the opposite end of the axis of credulity.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Saysys]

Actually theories are abstractions of the relationships between concepts that are only indirectly-measurable, while hypothesis are the more concrete understanding of the world derived from empirical evidence and link that which is measurable to that which is not. Without some level of indirect-measurement required there is no need for a theory, we would simply have fact... such as the fact of microbial evolution, the fact that DNA exists and so forth.

This means that theory is not something verifiable through observation, but a systematic method of understanding complex reality in a way that is parsimoniously comprehensible. If competing theories have also yet to be disproved then there is no 'right' theory, only a trade off between utility and falsifiability -> the more general the theory, the less well it is defined concretely through variables and hypothesis -> the better it is at abstracting reality and the worse it is at being falsifiable.

The point being that a "theory" is neither the super-hypothesis that you seem to think it is, nor is it the half-witted conjecture that the gpp thinks it is.

It is a multidimensional abstraction of reality that, while useful for explanation and at some point empirically disprovable, must reside at some level of abstraction and thus make trade offs between its usefulness and dis-provability.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[owlstead]

I would like to add that this kind of Hawking radiation is extremely slow process and that it has nothing to do with giant fireballs escaping from black holes as such. Or, very probably, anything else we can detect.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[t14m4t]

Several other comments talk about a pair of particles being created out of nothing, one gets absorbed and the other flies away. This is basically right, but can be confusing (the one that gets absorbed has negative energy in order to conserve energy). Here's an easier mental model....

Steve Hawking came up with an idea a while ago (70's perhaps?). He was thinking about black holes whose event horizon was around the size of an atom. Then he put it up against the Heizenberg Uncertainty Principle. He realized that particles in these black holes would have such a high degree of certainty about their position, that there would be such a low certainty about their velocity. Therefor, there would be some that would be REALLY fast. Not fast enough that they could escape the pull of the black hole, but fast enough that they could get just above the event horizon. There, they could give off a high-energy photon, and fall back in. This photon, since it was emitted outside the event horizon, would actually escape. This radiation can (and has been) detected, and causes what is known as evaporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation#Black_hole_evaporation

Ironically, this means that smaller black holes (which have higher certainty about a particle's position) evaporate faster. Large-ish black holes absorb more energy cosmic microwave radiation than they emit in Hawking radiation, but if they have small enough mass (I believe smaller than the size of our moon), they emit more Hawking radiation than they receive from the cosmic background.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[crazyeddie740]

Actually, in philosophy of science, falsifiability has been dead for decades, thanks to the Quine-Duhem Thesis. The Quine-Duhem Thesis states that a theory never makes a prediction in isolation, but does so in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses and propositions about initial conditions. This means that when we are faced with an observation that apparently falsifies our theory, we always have the option of "explaining away" the observation by rejecting at least one of our auxiliary hypotheses or propositions about initial conditions. (This does lead to the theory becoming more ad hoc.)

Falsifiability has pretty much been replaced by Bayesianism. Bayesianism uses Bayes' Theorem (used in many spam filters, btw), and allows us to talk about an observation confirming or disconfirming a theory. Confirmation does not mean "prove," it only means "makes more likely to be true." Same thing with disconfirmation: "makes less likely to be true," not "falsifies." This is a better fit with actual scientific practice, since scientists tend to look for evidence that confirms their theory, not evidence that fails to falsify it. But for some odd reason, philosophically aware scientists haven't gotten the memo about all of this, and they are still talking about an account of theory confirmation that's been dead for about 50 years.

Philosophers also think that you are never required to accept the results of a non-deductive argument (including the results of abduction, aka the scientific method), and you always have the option of withholding judgment. However, if you do accept a well-confirmed theory as being true, most epistemologists (who study knowledge) would agree that you are justified.

Re:How can a black hole emit anything?

[Saysys]

It's the Quine part of the QDT that has the real problem.

You see, an epistemological assumption that we can never know truth comes either from a limitation of human conscience or from an ontological assumption that there is no truth to be found.

In reality, there is a reality, there is truth, we are simply constrained by our human limitations when it comes to interpreting it.

If you read what I said I didn't argue that pure falsifiability can be obtained any more than the pure utility of a theory can be obtained; simply that these are theoretical anchor points on which the continuum of theory lies.

Remember: objective, not subjective, Bayesian inferences are what have brought us to the spam filters, etc.

End of the world.

[Monkeedude1212]

Let's do this grade 6 math puzzle style.

Expanding at ~1,000,000 km/h

12 million light years away.

It already has a radius of 1000 light years.

Assume a light year is 9.46 trillion km long.

Assuming this gas bubble was created by the universes first perpetual motion machine, so the growth is constant, how long before this gas bubble wipes out all life on Earth. Someone watch my math and make sure I didn't slip up.

(9,460,000,000 * 12) - 5000 = 113519995000 km to go.

113519995000 * 1000 = 113519995000000 hours left.

Or 4729999791666.6 repeating days
Or ~675714255952 weeks
or ~12994504922 years.

If we do live forever, mark your calendars, 12994506932, Earth is finished.

Re:End of the world.

[PPH]

But it will diminish in density. By the time it reaches us it will be nothing more than a malodorous puff of wind.

Re:End of the world.

[linzeal]

What is this black hole powered by, bean burritos?

Re:End of the world.

[BitZtream]

Only if we happen to be in the path of the jet, its not a sphere you know. I'm not upping my life insurance policy.

pictures are here

[at10u8]

Radio and x-ray images in their astro-ph preprint.

Re:Jokes

[Arthur Grumbine]

This is just begging for a "your momma" joke. Anyone want to do the honors?

Yo mama so unimaginative she can't come up with a good joke given ample material. Apparently it's hereditary.

Re:Third grade truism

[blair1q]

smell is chemical. therefore it's based on the interaction of electron clouds around atoms in particular configurations within molecules. therefore it acts by means of the electromagnetic force. therefore it's mediated by virtual photons. virtual photons are light. light can go only one direction in a black hole, and that's down. so the black hole can't smell it because the virtual photons of its nose can't interact with the virtual photons of the gas outside the black hole to indicate that there are electrons, atoms, and molecules there.

so there, smartypants.

Re:Imagery

[blair1q]

That's a piss-poor artist's rendition that on the one hand has a silly sun being slurped up like spaghetti by a black hole, and on the other hand has a depiction of the sort of jet that actually occurs at the poles of a spinning black hole.

The actual "bubble" is diffusion of the jet into gas somewhere off in the direction of the black hole, and is not depicted in that image.

Re:Jokes

[should_be_linear]

How about this: "Sciantists named this object "BP"

Re:Third grade truism

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Can somebody tell "slide rule" here, that Mr. Science left the building, about an hour ago?

It's now fart jokes, "all the way down."

200,000 years

[Lord Lode]

Is that 200,000 years from now, or 200,000 years from 12 million years ago? (since it's that many lightyears away)

Obligatory Futurama

[frieko]

"Think of the astronomical odors you'll smell thanks to me!"

So

[Dunbal]

I guess BP was drilling there, too.

Re:Third grade truism

[smash]

College in the US, right?

Re:In science

[DragonWriter]

"In science, a theory is a hypothesis" that has not been proven wrong. That does not prove it right.

Nothing outside of pure logic is ever "proven right". Science is a process of observation, providing hypotheses with explain the observations and predict future observations in a manner which makes them falsifiable, attempting to falsify the hypotheses, and replacing or refining them when they conflict with observations.

We do not have a clue what a black hole really is.

We certainly have a very many clues, which are the vast array of observations that underlie the current theoretical model, both those that black hole theory was created to explain and those that have occurred since in the testing of the theory, the refinement of some parts of it, and the validation of others.

We do not know for a fact.

This is true of the nature of black holes in the exact same sense that it is true of the theories in the fields of materials science and fluid mechanics that are used in building planes. We have masses of observations, we have a model which we can and have used successfully to predict results that weren't used in coming up with the model, but we have no way -- as with everything in the physical universe -- of directly "knowing" the underlying truth, only making observations and hypothesizing relations between them and testing those hypotheses.