Shock Collision inside Black Hole Jet

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Hubble Video Shows Shock Collision inside Black Hole Jet

When you’re blasting though space at more than 98 percent of the speed of light, you may need driver’s insurance. Astronomers have discovered for the first time a rear-end collision between two high-speed knots of ejected matter. This discovery was made while piecing together a time-lapse movie of a plasma jet blasted from a supermassive black hole inside a galaxy located 260 million light-years from earth.

The finding offers new insights into the behavior of “light saber-like” jets that are so energized that they appear to zoom out of black hole at speeds several times the speed of light. This “superluminal” motion is an optical illusion due to their being pointed very close to our line of sight and very fast speeds.

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[Waspie_Dwarf]

Hubble Time-lapse Shows Shock Collision in Black Hole Jet

This time-lapse movie of an extragalactic jet was assembled from 20 years of Hubble Space Telescope observations of the core of the elliptical galaxy NGC 3862.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Meyer STScI

Source: NASA.gov Video - YouTube Channel

[+OverSword]

That's amazing. They actually observe local events taking place in other galaxies. My only confusion about the description of what they assume they are observing is ejected matter from a black hole. Common lore tells us that nothing escapes the immense gravity of a black hole and yet here they are describing ejected material?

When I took a basic astronomy class as a high school sophomore (1980/81) we were supposed to write a final report and create a model on the subject of our choice. I went for black holes, something we had not spent much time on. I discovered to my dismay that at the time there were 3 prevalent theories on black holes, all of which in the various books I checked out on them were described as fact when the truth was they were entirely theoretical at the time (probably still are imo) I chose the langstrom theory in which black holes are a collapsed star which has become a gateway into another dimension.

Are they now saying that black holes are not the irresistible force "from which nothing, not even light can escape"? I wonder what they are really looking at here?

Granted I know nothing but this goes against the grain of what I thought was the common wisdom.

Edited May 29, 2015 by OverSword

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Common lore tells us that nothing escapes the immense gravity of a black hole and yet here they are describing ejected material?

The moral of this story is don't listen to common lore, listen to science. Fact will win over myth every time.

You have a very common misconception here, that nothing can escape from a black hole. That is not true. Nothing can escape from a black hole if it has passed beyond the event horizon. The event horizon marks the boundary at which the escape velocity reaches the speed of light. As long as the material has not passed the event horizon it can still be ejected.