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posted by martyb on Thursday January 02 2020, @07:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the wibbly-wobbly-spacetimey-jets dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

A Strange Black Hole Is Shooting Out Wobbly Jets Because It's Dragging Spacetime:

Some 7,800 light-years away, in the constellation of Cygnus, lies a most peculiar black hole. It's called V404 Cygni, and in 2015, telescopes around the world stared in wonder as it woke from dormancy to devour material from a star over the course of a week.

That one event provided such a wealth of information that astronomers are still analysing it. And they have just discovered an amazing occurrence: relativistic jets wobbling so fast their change in direction can be seen in mere minutes.

[...] V404 Cygni is a binary microquasar system consisting of a black hole about nine times the mass of the Sun and a companion star, an early red giant slightly smaller than the Sun.

The black hole is slowly devouring the red giant; the material siphoned away from the star is orbiting the black hole in the form of an accretion disc, a bit like water circling a drain. The closest regions of the disc are incredibly dense and hot, and extremely radiant; and, as the black hole feeds, it shoots out powerful jets of plasma, presumably from its poles.

[...] "We think the disc of material and the black hole are misaligned," [astrophysicist James] Miller-Jones said. "This appears to be causing the inner part of the disc to wobble like a spinning top and fire jets out in different directions as it changes orientation."

[...] It's a bit like a spinning top that starts to wobble as it's slowing down, the researchers said. This change in the rotational axis of a spinning body is called precession. In this particular instance, we have a handy explanation for it courtesy of Albert Einstein.

In his theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted an effect called frame-dragging. As it spins, a rotating black hole's gravitational field is so intense that it essentially drags spacetime with it. (This is one of the effects scientists hoped to observe when they took a picture of Pōwehi.)

In the case of V404 Cygni, the accretion disc is about 10 million kilometres (6.2 million miles) across. The misalignment of the black hole's rotational axis with the accretion disc has warped the inner few thousand kilometres of said disc.

The frame-dragging effect then pulls the warped part of the disc along with the black hole's rotation, which sends the jet careening off in all directions. In addition, that inner section of the accretion disc is puffed up like a solid doughnut that also precesses.

"This is the only mechanism we can think of that can explain the rapid precession we see in V404 Cygni," Miller-Jones said.

[...] the team had to [take] 103 separate images with exposure times of just 70 seconds and [stitch] them together to create a movie - and sure enough, there were the wibbly wobbly spacetimey jets.

A video explaining the activity is available on Vimeo.

A rapidly changing jet orientation in the stellar-mass black-hole system V404 Cygni, Nature (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1152-0)


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:34PM (2 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Thursday January 02 2020, @08:34PM (#938796) Journal

    Answer and Explanation:

    The amount of energy in a black hole is plausibly far greater than anything else in our universe, since a black hole's gravitational pull is so immense that light cannot escape it despite traveling millions of miles per hour. Science fiction writers have imagined scenarios where humans live on the boundary of a black hole, harvesting the energy of its very farthest reaches (and, usually for narrative's sake, eventually being sucked in). To tap this energy is far beyond the capabilities of humankind as we know it, and in all likelihood may never be achieved.

    https://study.com/academy/answer/how-much-energy-is-in-a-black-hole.html [study.com]

    Perhaps, they don't, they just have so much energy, that it doesn't effect them? I mean, you can drag around an extra hair all day and it won't seemingly effect you. Now, if you're dragging around a 50 pound weight, that'd have a much more serious effect on your energy levels.

    Beats me, though. I CLEP'ed chemistry, didn't pay that much attention in biology, and generally don't like doing a lot of complex math.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:46PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:46PM (#938824)

    Not "effect." Affect.

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 06 2020, @03:21PM

      by Freeman (732) on Monday January 06 2020, @03:21PM (#940207) Journal

      Seems like I'm in good company.

      Here's a list of words which are commonly used, misused, misspelled, and abused. Some of them appear on other grammar pages on this site. Use the Question form to submit more.

      https://www.hgpublishing.com/Grammar/WordList.html [hgpublishing.com]

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"