Black holes don’t just swallow matter. It can also fire powerful jets that shape the space around it.
A new study measured the strength of these jets in real time, giving scientists one of the clearest tests yet of long-held ideas about how black holes affect the wider universe.
The research was led by scientists from Curtin University in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Oxford.
The research team focused on Cygnus X-1, a famous star system consisting of a black hole and a massive supergiant star, and used a network of radio telescopes spread across Earth to capture the movements of the black hole’s jet in great detail.
space benchmark
Cygnus X-1 is particularly important because it contains the first black hole ever identified and is one of the best-known objects of its kind.
That familiarity makes it a powerful testing ground. If scientists want to understand how black hole jets actually work, systems like this are a good place to start.
The study found that the jets ejected from Cygnus X-1 have a surprising amount of power. Researchers say its energy output is equivalent to about 10,000 suns.
This suggests that jets are one of the main ways black holes release energy into their surroundings.
Scientists have long believed that this type of feedback plays a major role in shaping galaxies and the larger structure of the universe. The question directly proves that.
Observe the movement of a jet plane
Instead of estimating the jet’s average power over vast periods of time, the researchers used a series of images to watch the jet being swept away by the intense stellar wind from a supergiant star orbiting close to the black hole.
This move provided scientists with a valuable opportunity. The star’s winds acted like a force pushing on the fountain, bending the jet as the two objects moved around each other.
By knowing the wind strength and tracking how much the jet was deflected, the team was able to work backwards to calculate the jet’s force at that moment.
dancing jet images
The study’s lead author, Steve Prabhu, was working at the Curtin Institute for Radio Astronomy (CIRA) at the time of the study and is now based at the University of Oxford.
Prabhu said the researchers were able to make the measurements using a series of images of the “dancing jet.”
He uses the term to describe the pattern of jet movement as stars and black holes move around their orbits, repeatedly deflected in different directions by the supergiant’s powerful winds.
This is a smart approach because it turns the system’s apparent confusion into useful information.
Rather than treating bending as a nuisance, researchers used it as a key to measuring something that had been very difficult to pin down.
fast and very powerful
The researchers were also able to answer another long-standing question: how fast are jets traveling?
They discovered that the jet travels at about half the speed of light, or about 150,000 kilometers per second. This is an astonishing speed even by cosmic standards, and is another result that has been difficult to measure directly until now.
This measurement allowed scientists to understand what part of the energy emitted around the black hole is stored in the surrounding environment, thereby changing the environment.
“The key finding from this study is that about 10 percent of the energy released when matter falls toward a black hole is carried away by the jet,” Prabhu said.
“This is something scientists typically assume in large-scale simulation models of the universe, but until now it has been difficult to confirm with observations.”
That’s why this result is more important than Cygnus X-1 itself. In many computer models of the universe, scientists already assume that about 10 percent of the energy released by falling matter is redirected into jets.
But until now, this number has been far more of a pragmatic assumption than one that has been definitively determined by direct evidence. This study further supports that idea.
Why these findings are broadly important
One reason this discovery is so useful is that the physics around black holes is thought to scale in a fairly consistent way.
This means that results from a black hole that is only about 10 times the mass of the Sun can help astronomers understand the behavior of much larger black holes that are millions of times more massive.
Study co-author James Miller-Jones from CIRA said previous methods could only measure average jet power over thousands or millions of years, and could not accurately compare it to the instantaneous X-ray energy emitted by a falling object.
“And because our theory suggests that the physics around black holes is very similar, we can use this measurement to solidify our understanding of jets, whether they come from black holes 10 million times the mass of the Sun or 10 million times the mass of the Sun,” he said.
This “anchor” is important because black hole jets are expected to appear everywhere in the universe, not just in nearby or well-known star systems.
Astronomers are preparing for a future in which giant radio telescope projects will detect jets from black holes in millions of distant galaxies.
Having a reliable real-world benchmark then becomes invaluable.
Detecting jets from distant black holes
Future instruments, including the Square Kilometer Array Observatory under construction in Western Australia and South Africa, are expected to reveal the vast number of black hole jets that exist throughout the universe.
“Radio telescope projects such as the Square Kilometer Array Observatory currently under construction in Western Australia and South Africa are expected to detect jets from black holes in millions of distant galaxies, and the anchor point provided by this new measurement will help calibrate the overall output,” Miller-Jones said.
“Black hole jets provide an important source of feedback to the surrounding environment and are critical to understanding the evolution of galaxies.”
Scientists have long suspected that black hole jets help form galaxies and the entire universe. Now they have a clearer idea of how powerful those jets are and how much black hole energy they actually carry away.
In a field full of huge scales and indirect clues, this type of measurement is a major step forward.
The research will be published in a journal natural astronomy.
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