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posted by CoolHand on Monday January 28 2019, @05:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the riding-in-our-plasma-jets dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How to escape a black hole: Simulations provide new clues about powerful plasma jets: Interplay of twisting magnetic field, 'negative-energy' particles

[...] 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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @12:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @12:09PM (#793507)

    \blackhole