Be Amazed by a Cosmic Hurricane Spinning Around a Supermassive Black Hole

[Buster's Uncle]

Be Amazed by a Cosmic Hurricane Spinning Around a Supermassive Black Hole
Mic
By Kelly Dickerson  5 hours ago



Source: NASA



If you visited the center of a galaxy called J0230, you'd get pummeled with winds 625,000 times faster than any hurricane ever seen on Earth.

In that galaxy, astronomers have spotted a windstorm spinning a ring of debris, called a quasar, around a supermassive black hole. The winds are whipping at 200 million kilometers per hour, or about 20% the speed of light. At that speed, it would take under one second to travel around the globe. It's the fastest winds we've ever seen around a quasar, shattering the previous record by approximately 14 million kilometers per hour.

The wind is fueled by powerful radiation coming from the quasar. All that radiation makes the quasar glow about as bright as 22 trillion suns. It takes about 11 billion years for that light to reach us because J0230 is so far away.

Quasars often form around black holes. Scientists think the huge mass of a black hole is what powers a quasar and causes it to emit so much light. "Today, most scientists believe that super massive black holes at the galactic centers are the 'engines' that power the quasars," the European Space Agency stated.


http://news.yahoo.com/amazed-cosmic-hurricane-spinning-around-141800194.html

[Lorizael]

The language in this article makes things a little unclear. A quasar is really just a term for what we observe--quasi-stellar radio sources--from supermassive black holes that are churning out radiation from their accretion disk. There's no object called a quasar that is somehow hanging out near the supermassive black hole.

This lack of clarity is a regrettable consequence of the very interesting way in which quasars were discovered. At first, radio astronomers had no idea what they were, except that they looked like stars (point sources) and emitted radio waves. Later, it was learned that they were extremely distant, very active supermassive black holes in the hearts of galaxies.

[Buster's Uncle]

Alas, most science journalism is just not very good...

[Lorizael]

Well, there's that, but I honestly think it's understandable and results from the fact that astrophysical radio sources are still pretty new and weird. Quasars, Seyfert galaxies, blazars, active galactic nuclei... these are all names for things that got discovered haphazardly over the last half century or so. But now astronomers think they're basically the same thing, either viewed from different angles/with different obstructions or with varying levels of activity. They're all just some variety of a supermassive black hole being awesome. Given that astronomers were confused about these for a long time (and there are still a lot of questions), it's not surprising or all that unforgivable that journalists get confused, too.

[Buster's Uncle]

I believe they only figured out it was feeding black holes 20 years or so ago - honestly, I read about them before I was 10 when they were a huge mystery.