Black holes are notorious for gobbling up, well, everything. They're icons of destruction, ruthless voids, ambivalent abysses from which nothing can return — at least, according to pop culture. But black holes have another side: Astrophysicists have seen powerful jets, sometimes millions of light-years long, shooting out of supermassive black holes – including the one at the center of our own galaxy. So today, we're getting to know the other side of black holes, and the powerful role they may play in creating and shaping the cosmos. Read more about the Blandford-Znajek process.Got other cosmic curiosities? Email us at [email protected] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. In pop culture, black holes have developed this reputation for gobbling things up. Being these points in the universe where all matter, even light, is inescapably sucked up into this extraordinarily dense black void.
They're often seen as sort of cosmic vacuum cleaners. Just sucking in all the material, gas and stars that stray close.
That's Priyambada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University who focuses on black holes, specifically how extremely large ones came to be. And Priya says these supermassive black holes, like the one in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, are more than just cosmic vacuum cleaners.
Because when black holes eat material immediately around them, they create this bright disk, like a glowing donut.
But... What is counterintuitive is that we do see very powerful jets of material that are actually expelled from them as well.
Basically, black holes are really messy eaters, so not all the dust and gas they eat make it down the hatch. And for a supermassive black hole, this can look like beams of white-hot plasma and radiation shooting out of that glowing donut just outside the event horizon that makes up the edge of the black hole. Sometimes these beams are millions of light-years long.
Roger Blanford says you can think of these black hole jets carrying this massive amount of energy, kind of like nuclear power.
Of course, they can be famously destructive, but also it can be a source of power in a nuclear reactor.
Rogers is an astrophysicist and a professor at Stanford University. In the 1970s, when he and his friend Roman Znayek were at the University of Cambridge over in the UK, they started to look at how these black hole jets were created. And they came up with a hypothesis for how these jets were powered.
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