Black hole spews out 2-million-light-year-long stream of WTF Astronomers have spotted a supersonic cosmic jet blasting two million light years from the centre of a distant galaxy's supermassive black hole. Supermassive black hole The jet, which looks like the afterburner of a fighter plane, is moving at nearly the speed of light and its origins and composition are a mystery. A …
It depends on what you think is a single "thing," I suppose. Clusters of galaxies are larger than 2 million light years. Super-clusters are bigger still. These are organized in walls and filaments, and these in turn form the cosmic web. Quite a few people say the cosmic web is the largest thing.
Still an impressive jet.
> I personally hope never!
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
RIP, Douglas...
Vic.
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Close to. In physics a black whole is a white hole. It looses energy through hawkins radiation (Spell?). However, sending out the large jets also redistributes matter and energy around the universe back into, then out of, galaxies.
No idea if this is in balance or massively one sided though. Could it all end up in the black hole before it all ends up spewed back out? :P
*brain melts*
It doesn't have to... this is a distance you can get your head around (sort of).
Assuming you're in the Northern hemisphere on a clear night, take a pair of binoculars (they don't even have to be very powerful) and point them in the direction of Cassiopeia. Find the larger of the 2 triangles that make up the big "W" and follow it down towards the constellation of Andromeda. You should come across a dim oval shaped smudge of light taking up a healthy chunk of your field of view. This is M31 - the Andromeda galaxy.
M31 is about 2.5 million light years away and is one of the furthest things you can see with the naked eye (though it's a lot easier with binos). All you have to do is visualise a bloody great jet of 'WTF' extending from you to M31 and presto! You've visualised something 2 million light years long.
Regular astronomers may not know the origin and cause of jets, but plasma astrophysicists do, because they understand plasmas and how they produce particle beams, pinched filaments, cosmic Birkeland currents and astrophysical jets. The only thing what will accelerate charged particles away from a black hole is an electric field (magnetic fields make charged particles move in circles). The EM force is 10^40 times stronger than gravity.
Electromagnetic (EM) forces are ubiquitous throughout the universe. 99.999% of the visible universe is plasma by mass and by volume. Plasma consists of charged particles which generate electromagnetic fields. The heliospheric current sheet is the largest structure in our Solar System, and is due to EM forces. The Solar Wind overcomes the Sun's gravity because of electromagnetic forces.
What other force can overcome the gravitation force of a black hole?
Why is the jet non-linear? Every other image of a cosmic jet I have ever seen has been effectively a straight line.. this one appears to wriggle about as it moves outwards from the black hole.
Could it be that the jet is encountering massive resistance a it travels away from its parent causing the leading edge to slow down? I was thinking dark matter, but unless there is a vast amount of the crazy stuff in the immediate vacinity of this specific black hole then that explanation still doesn't satisy the question of why this jet is so different from othersthat have been visualised.
Of course I've just not looked at as many jet images as others around here :-)
Image of Celestial Chariot, with 2 Borg Cubes instead of furry dice, driven by a shell-suited Omnipotent Chav-Being called Shayne....
That might finally answer all those "but-why-does-God-allow-bad-things-to-happen" questions.
Answer? He's too busy, cant' be arsed, and anyway Call Of Duty version 3, 531,229 is out, so he's off to his mates and won't be back any time soon (eternity x 2).
If memory fails me well, don't the ejector plumes inevitably reach a distance where the goo they've spewed starts to be affected by the gravitational effects of other gigantic celestial gooblobs. Using the Vulture scale of unimaginability, I'll hazard a guess that this one is just a tiddler, and that something much larger, and moodier, is lurking in the background with a celestial yoyo thingy which it's using to snare its prey.
The most unimaginable thing I can't quite imagine is what this looks like from the other side..
*Paris, because I brainfarted in the lift.*
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