The jets are 23 million light years in length! That's 140 milky way galaxies laid out -- these are sizes I can't even begin to comprehend
Pretty crazy!
If the plasma jet is wildly larger than our entire galaxy, I wonder if some sort of exotic life could evolve inside the jet. Some sort of life that would be totally rare in the universe.
Sometimes I wonder if our whole universe is some kind of transient aberration, if you zoom out far enough
Not my field, but could the Big Bang have been a massive black hole that "spat" out jets of plasma that formed into new stars and galaxies? I call this the black hole big burp theory.
This is very close to an idea known as "Black hole cosmology" -- basically the idea being that the visible universe is inside a black hole, leading to a sort of "nested multiverse".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-hole_cosmology
A related theory, rather than being inside a black hole, is that the other side of a black hole is a "white hole". As matter collapses into a black hole, it is emitted from the white hole, creating another universe.
Here's an article from 2010 that expands on the idea, though this is definitely not the first time (or last time) it was discussed, it just happens to be an easily searchable article.
https://www.space.com/8293-universe-born-black-hole-theory.h...
Wow, thanks for the resources! I actually never heard of a living universe 'inside' a black hole.
This seems incompatible with inflation
Isn't universe inflation already on shaky ground though? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-inflation-...
> I wonder if some sort of exotic life could evolve
Some might say humans are exotic life that evolved.
The referenced paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07879-y
I have a question about black holes, HN.
Let’s say you have a black hole. You fire a laser beam straight into it. Just by symmetry, shouldn’t it blueshift on the way in, gain some preposterous amount of energy — enough that it can escape?
Light travels in a straight line - black holes don't "pull" light in, they change what a straight line looks like in the space around it.
The event horizon is the distance where all straight lines lead to the black hole.
Just think... in the presence of a constant magnetic field, this could be the most powerful particle collider in the visible universe
I’ve seen stellar engines [1] show up in fiction.
Has anyone done a galactic engine?
Very exciting until they figure out the jet is just a Starlink satellite passing in front of the telescope.
What happens to the plasma that the black hole spits out? Do they have any ideas?
I studied these objects for my first research paper in grad school. (You can see a few images of some of the objects I found in Figure 3 of my paper [1]) In essence the jet blows a hot bubble into the gas that comprises the intracluster medium of the galaxy cluster. Over time synchrotron radiation causes the bubble to cool down and eventually (maybe on the order of a few 100 million to a billion years if I recall right) the bubble comes into thermal equilibrium with the surrounding gas.
slows, cools, condenses into us sometimes
I think it just blasts off into the universe
Panspermia?
One hell of a thruster.
I thought that only hawking radiation could escape a black hole. Now a paper describing a vast jet of emitted plasma??
The article doesn't quite clarify this point. It mentions the jets shooting from below and above the black holes, but does this mean they're emerging from their interior or being created by the accretion of superheated material that forms in orbit around black holes?
The article simple states this, which seems wrong given the immense gravity of black holes:
>When supermassive black holes become active—in other words, when their immense forces of gravity tug on and heat up surrounding material—they are thought to either emit energy in the form of radiation or jets.
So the holes themselves emit energy jets or their accretion disks do? Sloppy damn phrasing and reporting, and all too common for science subjects.
Its not coming out of the black hole itself, its more like the black hole has an accretion disk around it of material that is being sucked in. The dynamics of the huge forces and energies involved can cause jets to form, throwing high energy particles away from the black hole. The jets still represent a tiny fraction of the matter, most of which is still heading into the hole.
And crazy strong and twisted magnetic fields that will heat things up/create large forces on charged particles.
Hawking radiation is one process, but for spinning black holes, especially ones with accretion disks and magnetic fields around them, there are two more theoretical predictions: the Blandford–Znajek process and the Penrose process.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet#Rotation_a...