They Pack a Huge Punch

I haven’t talked about black holes lately, so let’s take a look at the latest in what these suckers are doing. Astronomers have been watching the jets streaming out from the neighborhood of supermassive black holes (in the centers of galaxies) and found out that these high-speed streams are packed with heavy atoms of material that somehow don’t get swallowed up into the black hole. Instead, these jets act as cosmic recycling barges, sending matter and energy out to space.  If the jets are strong enough, and have enough influence, they can actually influences where and when a galaxy forms its stars.

So, what kind of heavy atoms are we talking about here?  Most black hole jets only carry electrons, which are quite l0w in mass. It turns out that astronomers using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton mission and a compact array radio telescope in Australia have found evidence of some unusual stuff — like iron and nickel — racing away from the black holes inside these superheated jets. They studied the black hole called 4U1630-47, which is a small black hole perhaps only a few times the mass of the Sun. Even though it’s small, the effects it has can be scaled up to larger black holes like the ones that hide in the cores of galaxies.

Jets carrying iron atoms away from a black hole must be very strong jets indeed. That’s because it takes a lot more energy to move iron than it does other, lighter particles such as electrons. The jets strong enough to carry iron and other heavy atoms are moving quite fast and are very powerful. When they smash into matter in space, they could annihilate it, thus destroying the material that a galaxy needs to create stars (and planets).

Black holes are implicated in the formation and ongoing evolution of galaxies, and this study shows one way in which they influence their surroundings.  I wonder what we’ll learn next about these pesky guys?