What Escapes A Black Hole?
Black Hole As illustrated, a black hole pulls gas and plasma off a nearby star. That matter rotates around the hole in an accretion disk. Interacting with magnetic fields, the matter accelerates to tremendous speeds and then shoots from the disk’s center. Illustration by M.Weiss/NASA/CXC Black holes have a bad rap. They’re known for sucking in everything around them, but matter can actually break away from their grasp, in the form of jets. Although astronomers have been aware of this for half a century, they didn’t know what exactly the jets were made of until last fall. After observing a black hole in the Milky Way estimated to be 10 times the mass of our sun, an international team of astrophysicists discovered that the jets are composed primarily of electrons and atomic...