Black hole plasma jets are shaped like bell-bottoms
Jets of high-energy plasma shooting away from supermassive black holes resemble bell-bottom pants — starting out narrow but ending with a flare. The shape can help astrophysicists tease out how such jets are launched and reveal details of their black holes, researchers report in the July Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “From studying this region where the geometric transition happens, we can understand the black hole better,” says astrophysicist Yuri Kovalev of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Most galaxies in the universe host supermassive black holes at the center. Some of those black holes are actively eating a surrounding white-hot disk of gas and dust, and shooting twin jets of high-energy particles many light-years into space. Those black holes and their disks are called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, and are among the brightest objects in the cosmos. Astronomers can see the glow from many billions of light-years away. For a long time, observations of these jets suggested they...