Dutch scientists finally reach the secret of the first jets of black holes

There has been a debate among scientists for the past 20 years about whether the aura and spurs are the same thing, and now the new study says they are indeed the same thing, but they are emerging one after the other.

For more than 20 years, physicists have argued about the way a black hole releases its first jets, but recently an international team led by researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was able to put an end to that controversy.

According to the study , which was published on March 7 in the journal Nature Astronomy, this team resorted to 410 X-ray observations from several telescopes around the world, conducted between 1996 and 2012, of a toxic black hole. GRS 1915+105" (GRS 1915+105).

As noted in a press release from the university, the researchers compared the X-ray data with radio data from the Ryle Telescope, a group of radio dishes located about 90 kilometers north of London that collect low-energy radio radiation from jet-holes. Especially black.

Special case

GRS 1915+105 is about 36,000 light-years away from us, and its mass is about 10 times the size of the Sun.

In this very special case, the matter does not enter directly into the black hole, but rather crowds around it in rings that represent the disk that surrounds it and that rotates very quickly, and with this crowding of matter particles emit radiation in the X-ray range.

It was previously seen black holes in a similar position and surrounded by a halo of matter, and others were seen releasing jets of plasma, which is one of the states of matter in which electrons are scattered around the nuclei of atoms and flow freely.

Scholars' controversy

There has been a debate among scientists for the past 20 years about whether the aura and jets are the same thing, and now the new study says they are indeed the same thing, but that they emerge one after the other, with the aura appearing first, then the massive jets following.

But when the researchers established this sequence, some unanswered questions arose. For example, the X-rays that telescopes collect from the corona contain more energy than can be explained by the temperature of the corona alone.

The researchers from this team assume that the black hole's magnetic field is what provides the energy difference, but this needs additional observations in the future.

The researchers also suggest that the principle they presented to explain the first moments of black holes burping, i.e. the shooting of their jets into space, may also apply to heavier black holes, and this may help us better understand the black hole at the center of our Milky Way.