Astronomers are using 100 newly found supermassive black holes as a laboratory for extreme physics experiments.
These black holes are nicknamed ‘blazars’ because they are shooting explosive jets of matter and radiation directly at Earth. The extreme environments of black holes are perfect to test physics to its limit, one of the study authors said in a statement.
“They provide us with opportunities to study theories of relativity, to better understand how particles behave at high energies, to study potential sources of cosmic rays that arrive here on Earth, and to study the evolution and formation of supermassive black holes and their jets,” Abe Falcon, leader of the high energy astrophysics group at Penn State, said in a May 10 statement.
Blazars launch when some of the matter surrounding a supermassive black hole doesn’t fall to its surface, but instead channels to the black hole’s poles at speeds approaching that of light. Because jet activity is directly linked to how supermassive black holes gather mass, unveiling this phenomenon could show how these cosmic titans grow to masses equivalent to millions or even billions of times that of the sun.
“Because the jet of a blazar is pointed directly at us, we can see them from much farther away than other black hole systems, similar to how a flashlight appears brightest when you’re looking directly at it,” research lead author and Penn State astronomy and astrophysics graduate student, Stephen Kerby, said in the same statement. “Blazars are exciting to study because their properties allow us to answer questions about supermassive black holes throughout the universe.”
Recent Comments