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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."
...Sirius did it!
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
You eat just ONE bean-shaped planet...
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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.
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.
In Liberty, Rene
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.
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.
Radio and x-ray images in their astro-ph preprint.
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.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
But it will diminish in density. By the time it reaches us it will be nothing more than a malodorous puff of wind.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
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.
I guess BP was drilling there, too.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.