Amazing power and speed of black hole jets revealed

For the first time, scientists have measured the instantaneous, mind-blowing power of jets ejected from a black hole.

The jet power from this relatively nearby black hole-star system was equivalent to 10,000 suns, an international team of researchers reported on Thursday.

They also tracked the speed of the jet: roughly 540 million km/h, half the speed of light.

Located 7,200 light-years away, Cygnus X-1 is not only the first black hole identified more than half a century ago, but also has a blue supergiant star as its permanent companion.

One light year is approximately 9.7 trillion kilometers.

Steve Prabu of the University of Oxford and his team based their findings on 18 years of high-resolution radio imaging obtained by a global network of telescopes.

He conducted the research while at Curtin University in Australia, leading to the study published in Nature Astronomy.

Prabu and his colleagues were able to measure the fast power of these “dancing jets,” as he calls them, as they were pushed in opposite directions by the stellar wind.

The group based its calculations on how much the jets are bent by the stellar wind and on computer modelling.

By now, a black hole’s jet power should be averaged over tens of thousands of years, the researchers said.

Prabu said an important finding was that 10 percent of the energy released as matter falls towards the black hole is carried by the jets.

On the narrow side of black holes, the star in Cygnus X-1 is constantly pulling gas from its playmate as they orbit each other.

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

The supergiant star feeds material into the black hole, providing it with something to “eat” and is ejected as a jet, Prabu said in an email.

These jets could 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 jet power in many more systems,” he said.