The immense power of black holes: Scientists record ‘dancing jets’

The immense power of black holes has been revealed, as scientists make the first accurate measurements of a distant void.

Using a radio telescope scanning the entire planet, scientists recorded the ‘dancing jets’ erupting from a black hole 7,000 light–years from Earth.

These jets unleash power equivalent to the output of 10,000 suns and travel at 150,000 km per second – nearly half the speed of light.

However, the terrifying fountains of superheated matter only use about 10 per cent of the energy gobbled up by the black hole as it feeds.

These incredible discoveries come from a binary system called Cygnus X–1, which is home to a supermassive star and a black hole.

The supermassive star creates enormous solar winds, kicking out 100 million times more mass every second than our sun at speeds three to four times as high.

Those winds are so powerful that they actually bend the jets by about two degrees, like wind buffeting the water emerging from a fountain.

Co–author Professor James Miller–Jones, of Curtin University, told the Daily Mail: ‘Since we know how strong the wind from the star is, we know how much force it creates on the jet. This allows us to figure out how powerful the jet is.’

Black holes are some of the strangest objects in the entire universe, containing matter so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.

However, while these super–dense objects absorb light, they also create a spectacular burst of energy in the form of black hole jets.

As matter is pulled in, it orbits the black hole like water circling the drain, accelerating to velocities approaching the speed of light.

Professor Miller–Jones says: As matter spirals in towards a black hole, it carries magnetic fields with it, and as these magnetic field lines get wound up, they help launch the jet.’

The jets from the biggest black holes can stretch several light–years out from the black hole, pumping vast amounts of energy into the surrounding area.

Understanding how powerful these jets really are is extremely important if you want to work out how fast a black hole is really feeding and growing.

Scientists can work out how fast it is eating by measuring X–rays released by the matter falling in, but they also need to know how much matter is being shot out in the jets.

Together, these measurements would give astronomers the black hole’s ‘energy budget’, which Professor Miller–Jones says is ‘a bit like counting calories, only for a black hole’.

The issue is that scientists have only been able to measure the average energy going into the jets over tens of thousands of years.

This is done by looking at how the jets inflate bubbles in surrounding gases, but it isn’t the most reliable method.

‘We can’t accurately compare that to the black hole feeding rate from the X–rays, since we don’t have measurements of how fast it was feeding thousands of years ago,’ says Professor Miller–Jones.

‘This new measurement finally allows us to accurately determine what fraction of the energy available from the matter falling in is able to be channelled into the jets.’

This is great news for astronomers because our best theories about how black holes work suggest that the physics should be the same no matter how big the black hole is.

That means this one accurate measurement can ‘anchor’ future studies of black holes, whether they are ‘five or five billion times the mass of the Sun’.

In turn, that discovery should help astronomers get a better understanding of how the universe as a whole reached its current state.

The jets from supermassive black holes play a key role in determining how planets, stars, and galaxies form.

In some cases, black hole jets can even inflate bubbles of gas that exceed the size of the host galaxy itself, exerting a profound impact on the galaxy’s evolution. 

Lead author Dr Steve Raj Prabu, of the University of Oxford, told the Daily Mail: ‘This process, known as “feedback”, plays a crucial role in regulating how galaxies grow and evolve.

‘In large–scale simulations of the Universe, scientists have had to assume how efficient black holes are at converting infalling energy into jets.’

‘Our result provides the first direct observational measurement of this efficiency, giving these simulations a much firmer observational foundation.’