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RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

Previously Reported [soylentnews.org] Black hole V404 is back in the news, last time it was for stripping and eating material from a companion star in its orbit. This time it is for being a bit tipsy [independent.co.uk] while it was at it.

While munching on its neighbor, V404 shot out bright jets of plasma into space. This isn't unusual for a black hole, however it normally occurs in a particular fashion. Emanating from the poles in a consistent direction.

a closer look at these jets revealed that instead they appeared to be firing in a wobbling pattern known as procession.

On Monday, in the journal Nature [redirectingat.com], James Miller-Jones, and his team of researchers from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, published their observations on the 2015 event and offered an explanation for V404 Cygni's odd behaviour. The black hole is misaligned.

“We were gobsmacked by what we saw in this system — it was completely unexpected,” said the University of Alberta's Gregory Sivakoff in a statement [nrao.edu] from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

V404 is surrounded by an accretion disk approximately six million miles (9.7 million kilometers) wide. Typically this disk spinning about a black hole does so on the same axis as the black hole itself. In V404's case it does not.

That misalignment was likely caused by the force of the supernova that created the created the Black Hole in the first place and combined with a phenomenon known as frame dragging it creates the spinning [top] like wobbling effect.

Frame Dragging [wikipedia.org] happens when "the intense gravitational force of the black hole pulls space-time around it as it spins."

8,000 light years from Earth, V404 is the first black hole 'observed' behaving in this fashion.

Original Submission