NASA just saw something come out of a black hole for the first time ever!
You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes typically suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA just spotted something mighty strange at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335.
Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), miraculously observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole. Then a massive pulse of X-ray energy spewed out. So, what exactly happened? That’s what scientists are trying to figure out now.
“This is the first time we have been able to link the launching of the corona to a flare,” Dan Wilkins, of Saint Mary’s University, said. “This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe.”
NuSTAR’s principal investigator, Fiona Harrison, noted that the nature of the energetic source is “mysterious,” but added that the ability to actually record the event should provide some clues about the black hole’s size and structure, along with (hopefully) some fresh intel on how black holes function. Luckily for us, this black hole is still 324 million light-years away.
So, no matter what strange things it’s doing, it shouldn’t have any effect on our corner of the universe.
so dis mean we gonn start usin black holes as universal shortcuts or inter-dimensional travel or?
Too high for this
oh my god
Black holes create flares at their poles sometimes. What this event did was teach astronomers more about how this actually happens. It’s not because the black hole itself is ejecting material, this is all material that’s circling it. This is not the first time this has been observed, either. In fact, this same black hole has had multiple flares over the years that it’s been observed, they just happened to be able to catch the back half of this major flare in detail.
