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Black hole caught spewing jets into space at nearly the speed of light (video)
By Elizabeth Howell 20 hours ago
- video at link -
A black hole shooting out gassy material at nearly the speed of light has been caught on video by a space telescope.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory saw an outburst from the black hole and its companion star, which are part of a binary system called MAXI J1820+070. The system is 10,000 light-years from Earth, which is relatively close to our planet in the cosmic scheme of things and allows for a detailed investigation.
As the companion star, which is about half the mass of the sun, whirls around the black hole, the strong gravity of the stellar-mass black hole — roughly eight times the mass of the sun — nabs material from the star into an accretion disk, producing a glowing sphere of gas that emits bright X-rays. Some of the gas falls back into the black hole, but some of it gets blasted away from the black hole in a pair of jets that point in opposite directions.
This outburst was one of the highest-speed explosions from stellar-mass black holes ever observed in X-rays, with about 400 million billion pounds (181 million billion kilograms) of material thrown out of the black hole in two jets that sprung up in July 2018.
More:
https://www.space.com/black-hole-jets-near-light-speed-chandra-video.html?utm_source=notification