These jets are a unique tool for probing supermassive black holes.
- Morgan Fraser
The results, published in the journal Science, are based on new radio observations tracking a star as it gets torn apart by a black hole. Such violent events yield a burst of light which is produced as the bits and pieces of the star fall into the black hole. For the first time, the researchers were able to show that this burst of light is followed by a radio signal from the matter that was able to escape the black hole by travelling away in a jetted outflow at nearly the speed of light.
The discovery of the jet was made possible by a rapid observational response after the stellar disruption (known as ASAS-SN-14li) was announced in December 2014. The radio data was taken by the by the 4 PI SKY team at Oxford, using the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager Large Array located in Cambridge.
“Previous efforts to find evidence for these jets, including my own, were late to the game,” said Sjoert van Velzen of Johns Hopkins University, the study’s lead author. Co-author Nicholas Stone added that “even after they got to the game, these earlier attempts were observing from the bleachers, while we were the first to get front row seats.”
In this branch of astronomy, the ‘front row’ means a distance of 300 million light years, while previous observations were based on events at occurring least three times as far away.
- See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-to-escape-a-black-hole#sthash.GVJzQjaJ.dpuf
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Image: Detail from animation of a black hole devouring a star
Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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