You don’t have to be a science specialist to understand that black holes frequently pull things in rather than spew them out. However, NASA has recently detected something strange in the vicinity of the supermassive black hole Markarian 335.
The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and two NASA satellite telescopes watched a black hole’s corona being “propelled” away from a supermassive black hole. Then a massive blast of X-ray radiation was released. So, what exactly happened? That is what scientists are currently attempting to comprehend.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to link the launching of the corona to a flare,” Saint Mary’s University’s Dan Wilkins stated. “This will help us understand how supermassive black holes fuel some of the most brilliant things in the universe.”
The nature of the energy source remains a “mystery,” according to Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR’s principal investigator, but the ability to actually catch the event should provide some indicators about the black hole’s size and structure, as well as (hopefully) some new insight into how black holes work. This black hole, fortunately for us, is still 324 million light-years distant. So, whatever strange things it does, it shouldn’t have any effect on our little corner of the universe.
Black holes
A black hole is an area of spacetime where gravity is so powerful that nothing can escape, not particles or even electromagnetic radiation like light. According to general relativity theory, a sufficiently compact mass can bend spacetime and generate a black hole. The event horizon is the point beyond which there is no escape. Although it has a significant impact on the fate and circumstances of an object passing through it, general relativity states that it has no locally visible properties. A black hole is similar to an ideal black body in many ways because it does not reflect light. Furthermore, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons produce Hawking radiation with the same spectrum as a thermal black body. Its mass is inversely proportional to its size. For stellar black holes, this temperature is in the billionths of a kelvin range, making direct observation unfeasible.
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