Most powerful black hole jet ever spotted by NASA’s Chandra (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“Mozart’s music is like an X-ray of your soul – it shows what is there, and what isn’t.” -Isaac Stern

When supermassive black holes have a large amount of matter fall onto them, they accelerate a large amount of the ionized material — particularly electrons — into high-velocity, bi-directional jets. In many cases, those jets of material collide with previously blown-off gaseous material and create high-energy X-rays.

A black hole more than a billion times the mass of the Sun powers this X-ray jet that’s many thousands of light years long. Image credit: NASA / Hubble / STScI / Wikisky tool, of the nearby giant elliptical galaxy, M87.

While these can often be visible across the cosmos, it’s very rare to have a jet so large. The galaxy Pictor A, imaged by Chandra over a 15 year timescale, has the longest known such jet at 300,000 light years, culminating in a “hot spot” shockwave, where the electrons collide with the gas at greater than the speed of sound. A counterjet, invisible with all other telescopes, was also found by Chandra.

X-ray emission from the jet in Pictor A. Image credit: “Deep Chandra observations of Pictor A”, M.J. Hardcastle et al. (2015), from http://ift.tt/1KGHU9M.

Go get the full story in 200 words, pictures and video (!) on today’s Mostly Mute Monday.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/28K2qhv

“Mozart’s music is like an X-ray of your soul – it shows what is there, and what isn’t.” -Isaac Stern

When supermassive black holes have a large amount of matter fall onto them, they accelerate a large amount of the ionized material — particularly electrons — into high-velocity, bi-directional jets. In many cases, those jets of material collide with previously blown-off gaseous material and create high-energy X-rays.

A black hole more than a billion times the mass of the Sun powers this X-ray jet that’s many thousands of light years long. Image credit: NASA / Hubble / STScI / Wikisky tool, of the nearby giant elliptical galaxy, M87.

While these can often be visible across the cosmos, it’s very rare to have a jet so large. The galaxy Pictor A, imaged by Chandra over a 15 year timescale, has the longest known such jet at 300,000 light years, culminating in a “hot spot” shockwave, where the electrons collide with the gas at greater than the speed of sound. A counterjet, invisible with all other telescopes, was also found by Chandra.

X-ray emission from the jet in Pictor A. Image credit: “Deep Chandra observations of Pictor A”, M.J. Hardcastle et al. (2015), from http://ift.tt/1KGHU9M.

Go get the full story in 200 words, pictures and video (!) on today’s Mostly Mute Monday.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/28K2qhv