Black hole powers jet with magnetism
hole uses its own magnetism to invisibly beam energy out to one of its massive jets, in a novel process a new study has revealed.
Like many other giant black holes, distant quasar 3C279 is spitting out massive jets of material thousands of lightyears into space. However, when astronomers took a closer look at the object using the Event Horizon Telescope
A black
– a network of observatories which famously imaged the shadow of a black hole for the first time in 2017 – they saw the jet started a great distance away from the black hole with no apparent method of transferring energy between jet and black hole.
To take a deeper look at the unseen interaction between black hole and jet, astronomer Amit Shukla from the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore examined 3C279 at sub-millimetre wavelengths. This revealed that the light from the jet was flickering in a distinctive pattern which happens when magnetic field lines reconnect. This suggested the energy was carried away from the black hole along the magnetic field lines, before being deposited into the jet when they snapped together. https://eventhorizontelescope.org/