📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

Ask Ethan: why such bright quasars turn out from black holes?

Black holes are a mystery of the Universe: regions of space in which a very large mass concentrates in such small volumes that nothing can escape from its gravitational attraction, even light. No matter what energy or speed the object picks up inside the horizon of the BH events, it can never escape and affect the Universe from the outside.

image

That’s what makes our reader’s question interesting:
How is it possible that supermassive black holes become quasars when they “devour” too much too quickly? One would expect all matter to just suck inside.

This is one of the strangest phenomena that can be imagined: BH, an object whose attraction nothing can escape, gives rise to a class of the brightest of all the objects observed.


')
Quasars are very interesting objects, so interesting that when we first saw them, we had no idea what they were. With the development of radio astronomy, we began to discover these incredibly bright sources of radio emission. But looking at them in other ranges - visible, X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, microwave - we did not see anything. For some reason, these were sources of radio waves, point, concentrated sources that did not emit any other signals. And we called them quasi-stellar radio sources (Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources, QSRS), or quasars.



Over time, we began to find various interesting properties of these objects:

• Almost all of them are located very far away, on huge redshifts, surpassing other limitations of our field of view.
• Brightness in the radio band showed that something energetically more powerful is happening there than anything we have seen before.
• Objects looked different to us depending on how they were oriented towards us.

As a result, our observation tools have improved so much that we began to discover similar features in quasars and other classes of objects: active galactic nuclei, blazars and magnetars.



We began to understand that these objects are based on something in common: a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy is somehow fed by matter and emits a huge amount of material and radio emission into space. As a result, our observations have advanced so much that we were able to identify the home galaxies of these quasars, even located billions of light years from us.

But how does this happen? How do these supermassive black holes emit so much energy? Shouldn't they absorb, suck in all matter and energy? After all, this is the feature of BH that we all know: they suck everything in, and there is no salvation from them.



Although it’s really impossible to escape from them, how true is it that they “suck everything up”? It is not true. Illustrations and visualizations, including video from NASA above - all incorrect. In fact, being near a horizon of events near a BH is the same thing as being near any other source of gravity. If the Sun were suddenly replaced with a BH of the same mass, 1.99 * 10 30 , the Earth and all the other planets would continue to move in their orbits in the same way as now.

The reason why quasars behave this way is the ability of very large masses to accelerate matter in the vicinity to enormous speeds.



Matter forms around the BH accretion disk, and accelerates there to such speeds that as a result radiates energy at many frequencies, including the radio. You can see perpendicular to the accretion disk relativistic jets, or jets, accelerated flying matter, expelled at relativistic speeds. The radiation sources, which we call Blazars, are oriented so that one of the jets is directed at us, while the other active galaxies are oriented differently.



Quasars have such brightness, since the matter they digest breaks apart, and then accelerates under the influence of irresistible gravitational force. It gives off so much energy, as the particles of matter react with each other, heat up, and emit radiation. They are visible from such great distances, because in their heart are BHs weighing hundreds of millions or even billions of solar, and they absorb matter weighing millions of solar.

BH - this is not a vacuum cleaner space. They are "biscuit monsters" of the cosmos, because they have a lot of potential food flying past their mouths.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/400307/


All Articles