Black Holes Radiate Jets of Light, and

Scientists Now Know Why

NASA Goddard

Despite the name, black holes aren't strictly black. Those infinitely massive
sinkholes in space actually shine pretty brightly, thanks to both a white-hot
accretion disk spinning around them and two gigantic jets of plasma blasting from
each end. Why those jets shine was a mystery to scientists, but a new study
presents a fascinating explanation.

The leading theory for how these powerful jets form goes like this: gas and dust
collect in the orbit of a black hole, forming a dense, spinning accretion disk that
experiences enough friction to heat up into a magnetized plasma. Intense gravity
from the black hole twists and warps that magnetic field with so much force that it
eventually erupts in the form of two magnetic pillars that rocket out each end of
the black hole.

Plasma shoots through these pillars, quickly gaining speed as they fly over a vast
distance sometimes further than an entire galaxy. At some point, the plasma
begins to shine. If it's a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, that
forms a quasar (or, if it's pointing toward us, a blazar). Why and at what point this
light appears been a matter of debate.

To find out, astronomers found two systems in the Milky Way called X-ray
binaries, where a black hole is feeding off of a regular star. Then they called on two
telescopes: NASA's NuSTAR space telescope to detect the X-ray light that would
emit from all of the material in the jet, and the fast camera called ULTRACAM on
the William Herschel Observatory in Spain to catch the moment the jet emitted
optical light.

Despite the fact that these two black hole systems were very different one, called
V404 Cygni, experienced the brightest outburst ever seen in this century; the
other, called GX 339-4, was at minimum brightness and had a star and black hole
that was much closer together the results were the same. There were similar
time delays, about a tenth of a second, between when NuSTAR detected the X-ray
light from material shooting out of the black hole and when ULTRACAM detected
flares of optical light.

That gave astronomers a good explanation of how these jets shine. Plasma
shooting out of the black hole creates X-rays almost immediately as strong
magnetic fields accelerate it to incredibly high speeds, causing the particles to
collide and creating a burst of optical light.

In the super-bright V404 Cygni, the cosmic onramp where the plasma feels the
greatest acceleration and begins to shine is an expanse of about 19,000 miles
(30,000 kilometers) from the black hole about three times the diameter of
Earth. Scientists have suspected that the time delays in more massive black holes
are even greater, which suggests that the length of this onramp depends on the
mass of the black hole.

That's exciting, because this study of smaller black holes seems to also explain the
supermassive black holes that reside at the center of galaxies, including our own.
For a place where light can't escape, black holes sure are bright.

For more on black holes, check out "A Black Hole is Not a Hole" by Carolyn
Cinami DeCristofano. The audiobook is free with a 30-day trial of Audible.
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Written by Ashley Hamer December 7, 2017

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