American Physical Society | Physics Viewpoint | 2019 Jan 23
Simulations of the environment around a spinning black hole give new insight into the formation of luminous jets seen from Earth.
Black holes are creatures of darkness. They creep through the Universe emitting no light of their own, outside of a faint halo of Hawking radiation that is all but invisible for known black holes. So it is one of the great ironies of astronomy that, time and again, black holes have been found lurking in the brightest places in the cosmos. This association between black holes and light arises because the incredible gravitational forces exerted by a hole can impart energy to nearby material, causing it to radiate. An example of this process occurs in black hole jets, where black hole rotation and magnetic fields combine to create a stream of plasma particles that emit light over a wide range of wavelengths. A new set of simulations—performed by Kyle Parfrey from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, and colleagues—offers an in-depth look at black hole jets, tracking, for the first time, the motion of the plasma particles that are produced through pair creation in the vicinity of the black hole. The results show that large numbers of these particles rob energy from the black hole’s rotation. These kinds of simulations may play a key role in decoding the signals from black holes in the distant Universe and in our own Milky Way. ...
How to Escape a Black Hole: Simulations Provide
New Clues to What’s Driving Powerful Plasma Jets
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | 2019 Jan 24
First-Principles Plasma Simulations of Black-Hole Jet Launching ~ Kyle Parfrey et al
- Physical Review Letters 122(3):5101 (25 Jan 2019) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.035101
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1810.03613 > 08 Oct 2018 (v1), 10 Oct 2018 (v2)