CNN vandaag: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/24/science/massive-black-hole-jets-porphyrion/index.html
fenomeen black hole
Astronomers have observed a massive pair of jets releasing from a supermassive black hole 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. The megastructure spans 23 million light-years in length, making these black hole jets the largest ever seen, according to new research.
Black holes are viewed as the garbage disposals of the universe, gobbling up nearly everything that comes close to them. But a fraction of material is ejected before an object falls in, forming a jet on either side of the black hole, said Martijn Oei, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the lead author of a new study describing the discovery.
The findings were published September 18 in the journal Nature.
Black hole jets can accelerate radiation and particles close to the speed of light, causing them to glow in wavelengths visible to radio telescopes. Such a glow drew the attention of astronomers behind the new study while they were surveying the sky using Europe’s LOFAR, or LOw Frequency ARray radio telescope, in 2018.
The newly described jets have a power output equivalent to that of trillions of suns and are so massive that researchers have nicknamed the megastructure Porphyrion after a giant from Greek mythology.
The discovery is causing astronomers to rethink their understanding of how massive black hole jets can be as well as how these giant features can affect their surroundings and the structure of the universe.
“This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total,” Oei said. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions.”
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