La Jornada: They discover that the jets of a black hole are as powerful as 10 thousand suns

Scientists have managed to measure for the first time the astonishing instantaneous power of the jets emanating from a black hole.

An international research team reported Thursday that the power of these jets, coming from a relatively nearby black hole-star system, is equivalent to 10,000 suns.

In addition, they tracked its speed: approximately 540 million kilometers per hour, which is half the speed of light.

The system, known as Cygnus One light year is equivalent to almost 9.7 billion kilometers.

Steve Prabu of the University of Oxford and his team based their findings on 18 years of high-resolution radio images obtained by a global network of telescopes. He conducted the research while still at Australia’s Curtin University, which spearheaded the study published in Nature Astronomy.

Prabu and his colleagues measured the rapid power of these “dancing jets,” as he calls them, as they were pushed in opposite directions by the star’s wind. The group based their calculations on how much the jets were bent by the stellar wind, as well as computer models.

Until now, the researchers noted, the power of a black hole’s jets had to be averaged over tens of thousands of years.

Prabu said a key finding is that 10 percent of all the energy released as matter falls toward the black hole is carried by the jets.

Cygnus Discovered in the 1960s, the binary system is located in the constellation of Cygnus, or Cygnus, of our Milky Way.

The supergiant star feeds material to the black hole, giving it “something to ‘eat’ and spew out,” Prabu explained in an email.

These jets can help scientists better understand how black holes help shape galaxies and other cosmic structures through large-scale shocks and turbulence.

Prabu plans to apply similar techniques to other black holes. “It would be exciting to measure the power of the jets in many more systems,” he said.