Black hole is discovered pumping out jets of heavy metals at 440 MILLION mph



A stronomers used XMM-Newton to study a black hole called 4U1630-47

They found the first evidence of heavy atoms - iron and nickel - in the jets

This means jets can carry energy away in larger amounts than first thought

Finding could help scientists narrow down exactly how black hole jets form



A black hole has been found to be pumping out of iron and nickel into the universe – spewing out more powerful jets that scientists first thought.

Black holes usually put out jets of low-mass particles, thousands of light-years long, into surrounding galaxies.

These jets recycle matter and energy into space and can affect when and where a galaxy forms stars.

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A black hole has been found to be pumping out of iron and nickel into the universe - spewing out more powerful jets that scientists first thought. The 4U1630-47 star system is depicted above in an artist's illustration, with a large blue star on the right and jets emanating from a black hole in the centre of the disc on the left

WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?

A black hole is a region of space-time where gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. It is called 'black' because it absorbs all the light that hits the horizon, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics. Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings Astronomers and physicists have known that a black hole that spins could in principle produce a jet, but a mechanism for doing so has been a mystery.

But this is the first time a black hole has been discovered to be pumping out heavier atoms, which are thought to be moving at two thirds the speed of light - or 440 million mph.

Black holes are sinks for matter and energy. They are so dense that not even light can escape from their clutches.

Stellar-mass black holes are often found feasting on material from a companion star.



Matter flows from the star towards the black hole, circling in a disc around it with a temperature so high that it emits X-rays.



The black hole can be a fussy eater: instead of swallowing all of the material, it sometimes pushes a fraction of it away in the form of two powerful jets of particles.



Because these jets release mass and energy into the surroundings, the black hole has less material to feed on.



Astronomers and physicists have long-known about this phenomena, but the exact mechanism behind it has been a mystery.

The latest observation could help scientists narrow down exactly where the jets form.

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space telescope snapped the black hole, dubbed 4U1630-47, producing jets of the material.

The findings were confirmed by the Compact Array radio telescope in eastern Australia run by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

‘Jets from supermassive black holes help determine a galaxy's fate — how it evolves,’ expained CSIRO’s Dr Tasso Tzioumis, a member of the research team.

‘Heavy atoms have been seen in jets from one other system, SS433, but that’s a very unusual system, an oddball, whereas this system is quite typical, much more likely to represent black holes in general,’ Dr Tzioumis said.

The findings were confirmed by the Compact Array radio telescope in eastern Australia run by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

An iron atom is about 100,000 times more massive than an electron. When a massive particle is moving it carries more energy than a lighter particle moving at the same speed.

The discovery suggests that jets are powered by the black hole's accretion disk — a belt of hot gas swirling around the black hole — and not by the spin of the black hole itself, which would be more likely to produce jets containing only light particles.

While 4U1630-47 is a small black hole, a few times the mass of the sun, the physics of black holes ‘is scalable’, said Dr Tzioumis, meaning that the finding would apply to larger black holes.

When such fast-moving jets containing heavy particles smash into matter in space, they could generate gamma rays and neutrinos, which might be detectable with current and future telescopes.

'While we now know a great deal about black holes and what happens around them, the formation of jets is still a big puzzle, so this observation is a major step forward in understanding this fascinating phenomenon,' said Norbert Schartel, ESA's XMM-Newton project scientist.

