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[...] New simulations led by researchers working at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have combined decades-old theories to provide new insight about the driving mechanisms in the plasma jets that allows them to steal energy from black holes' powerful gravitational fields and propel it far from their gaping mouths.
The simulations could provide a useful comparison for high-resolution observations from the Event Horizon Telescope, an array that is designed to provide the first direct images of the regions where the plasma jets form.
[...] The simulations, for the first time, unite a theory that explains how electric currents around a black hole twist magnetic fields into forming jets, with a separate theory explaining how particles crossing through a black hole's point of no return -- the event horizon -- can appear to a distant observer to carry in negative energy and lower the black hole's overall rotational energy.
It's like eating a snack that causes you to lose calories rather than gaining them. The black hole actually loses mass as a result of slurping in these "negative-energy" particles.
[...] Performed at a supercomputing center at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, the simulations incorporate new numerical techniques that provide the first model of a collisionless plasma -- in which collisions between charged particles do not play a major role -- in the presence of a strong gravitational field associated with a black hole.
The simulations naturally produce effects known as the Blandford-Znajek mechanism, which describes the twisting magnetic fields that form jets, and a separate Penrose process that describes what happens when negative-energy particles are gulped down by the black hole.
The Penrose process, "even though it doesn't necessarily contribute that much to extracting the black hole's rotation energy," Parfrey said, "is possibly directly linked to the electric currents that twist the jets' magnetic fields."
While more detailed than some earlier models, Parfrey noted that his team's simulations are still playing catch-up with observations, and are idealized in some ways to simplify the calculations needed to perform the simulations.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @05:53PM (6 children)
This is typical "force the universe into a preconceived narrative", more commonly known as *faith*. I don't like it.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @06:06PM (2 children)
Yeah, I think you're right. The universe obviously makes more sense when we consider that a cometary Venus must have been ejected from Jupiter and that the lizard people engineered the proto-Saturn nova in order to build the Sol-Thuban fatline.
What do those scientist dorks know?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @11:58PM (1 child)
Sounds every bit as plausible and dark matter and negative energy, which comes from bad vibes, by the way. I think they need to conduct more LSD experiments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @12:32AM
At least we can all agree on something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @09:05PM
You have a good point here. We have little empirical knowledge of black holes, and it's all theoretical. It's very likely that any models based on them are wrong, possibly in some fundamental and irreconcilable way with reality (assuming they even exist).
On the other hand, there is definitely value in these kinds of thought experiments. They reveal contradictions and obvious holes in the theory... or reveal things which *are* testable which can either bolster or undermine a theory.
As long as in the end they get to something which is actually testable, and then those things are in fact tested, then it's not just blind faith for the sake of glorifying the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @09:31PM (1 child)
You don't like faith? Have you ever considered that there are two possibilities, either God exists and he granted you with self-determination, or the universe just exists as a giant computer running a predetermined program based on initial conditions set by chance, and everything you do, think, and will do is already predetermined. Enjoy!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday January 28 2019, @10:29PM
Have you ever considered that there are more than two possibilities?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.