Oct 22 2001
From The Space Library
A team of European and American astronomers announced that they had obtained the first observations of energy leaving a black hole. The scientists, who had used ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite to observe a supermassive black hole in the center of galaxy MCG-6–30–15, had detected an x-ray glow emanating from iron gas that was moving at half the speed of the light that was close to the black hole. The scientists believed that the x-ray glow resulted from friction produced by matter rotating around a black hole before falling into it. Because the black hole’s gravity is sufficiently intense to wrap magnetic field lines around it, the entwined magnetic fields tighten around the black hole, slowing its rotation, and, as a result, increasing the temperature of the region surrounding the black hole. Observed gravity-stretching particles of light in the iron gas, the scientists had discovered unexpectedly that the total energy output of the gas was too high for only gravity and the descent of matter into the black hole to be providing the power source. The scientists had concluded that an additional power source must be increasing the energy output of the gas to the observed intensity. (NASA, “New Energy Source ‘Wrings’ Power from Black Hole Spin,” news release 01-200, 22 October 2001; Jörn Wilms et al., “XMM-EPIC Observation of MCG-6-30-15: Direct Evidence for the Extraction of Energy from a Spinning Black Hole,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters 328, no. 3 (11 December 2001): L27–L3 1.)
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