Why Some Supermassive Black Holes Have Big Jets 111
astroengine writes "Some of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies have powerful jets blasting from their poles, and others have weak jets, but many don't have jets at all. Why is this the case? In new simulations carried out by astronomers at NASA and MIT, it would appear that the way in which the black hole spins relative to its accretion disk may be a contributing factor. Strangely enough, the results indicate that if the black hole rotates in the opposite direction to its accretion disk, the most powerful jets form. The region between the black hole event horizon and the accretion disk still baffles scientists, so these simulations are very speculative, but the results seem to match what radio astronomers are seeing in the cores of active galaxies. Perhaps it's time to fire up that event horizon telescope!"
Re:I'm not qualified to read this article. (Score:3, Insightful)
A black hole can have spin and charge, because these are both universally conversed quantities.
If a black hole is an empty region of space with a honking great curvature then where is the charge? If it's the result of charged matter taking forever to actually reach the singularity how can the mediator cross the event horizon? If it's matter outside the horizon, is it properly considered part of the black hole; I assume that virtual particles are released equally as far as charge is concerned? What, exactly, in a black hole carries the charge. Come to think about it, how can we know they're charged at all? We can and have theorised it but is it even possible to verify experimentally?
Excuse me, I seem to broken my question mark key.
Re:Here's a silly question (Score:2, Insightful)
Well what you need to do is forget the idea of a "singularity" (a division by zero, etc.) that's just an artifact from the math, and we've shown (i believe) that the math breaks down after you hit the event horizon (and possibly at the event horizon, i don't recall correctly). What this means is that we have no way of knowing or understanding what happens to the matter there.