A jet of a different kind

Black holes create jets of a different kind, the kind consisting of charged particles of gas spun up to unimaginable amounts of energy thousand of light years long as seen by the video above.

The process ...

Roger Blandford and Roman Znajek, young physicists at the University of Cambridge in 1977, argued that rotating supermassive black holes will twist ambient magnetic fields into a tight helix, and that this twisting will create a voltage that draws energy up and out of the hole and along the helix. This, they claimed, is the jet — and a big asterisk on the naive notion that nothing escapes black holes.

The stripes of polarized light around M87’s black hole reveal the strong magnetic fields at work.

At the time, all ingredients of the process were speculative, but the new observations confirm the Blandford-Znajek idea. “What we see in our image is ordered polarization in a spiral shape,” said Issaoun, who was involved in analyzing the polarization measurements. “And the shape of the magnetic field is also spiral … which means it’s able to launch a jet.”

Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine; insets adapted from Michael O’Riordan et al.

A jet of a different kind indeed. 

Jets emerging from the galaxy Cygnus A create massive interstellar blobs, visible here in radio waves.