Black holes that burp
Some black holes in outer space may actually spit out as much material as they suck in
It wouldn’t be very pleasant to go near a black hole. Armed with an enormous gravitational pull, the incredibly tiny but supermassive object would swallow you alive. In the process, it would stretch you into a piece of spaghetti. Black holes are black because they engulf everything in sight, including light.
Now, scientists say, it looks like some black holes actually spit out as much material as they suck in. Black-hole burps may even fill outer space with many of the building blocks of life.
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Illustration of a massive black hole flanked by swirling gas (green).
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| Chandra/M. Weiss |
The new observations come with the help two satellites. They are NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite. George Chartas of Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues used these spacecraft to look at two quasars. These are extremely bright and distant beams of high-energy light powered by rotating black holes.
By looking at magnified light from the two quasars, Chartas and his team for the first time detected high-energy winds coming from black holes.
The winds travel at 20 to 40 percent of the speed of light (which is really, really fast). And they spit out billions of suns worth of gas. Those gases include oxygen, carbon and iron — important elements necessary for life. So, even though black holes make up only a tiny share of a galaxy’s mass, they may play an important role in galaxy evolution.
Still, with all the sucking, spitting and burping they do, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to try to look inside a black hole, even if you could get close enough!
