Posted on 05/29/2006 6:15:03 PM PDT by anymouse
A distinctive feature of black holes is the discharge of narrow jets that shoot matter into space in a continuous stream near the speed of light.
But NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has recently found one of these jets around a dense stellar corpse known as a neutron star.
"For years, scientists suspected that something unique to black holes must be fueling the continuous compact jets because we only saw them coming from black hole systems,” said Simone Migliari, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. “Now that Spitzer has revealed a steady jet coming from a neutron star in an X-ray binary system, we know that the jets must be fueled by something that both systems share.”
X-ray binary systems are made up of a normal star and a neutron star or black hole. The normal star orbits the dense, collapsed star, similar to how the Earth orbits the Sun.
The gravity of the neutron star, greater than 14 times the mass of its revolving smaller and less massive partner in this case, collects the material leaving the orbiting star and creates a disk of matter around itself.
This disk, known as an accretion disk, has a very strong gravitational field, a characteristic of both black holes and neutron stars of X-ray binary systems.
“Our data show that the presence of an accretion disk and an intense gravitational field may be all we need to form and fuel a compact jet,” Migliari said.
Finding the compact jets produced by black holes has been done with radio telescopes. But the narrow jets of neutron stars are up to 10 times fainter, which means that it would take much longer to gather enough data to identify one.
But Spitzer has super-sensitive infrared eyes that can detect jets such as this one, located almost 10,000 light years away in the constellation Orion, in minutes.
space ping
Elvis has just left the solar system.
And here I got all excited thinking this was about
Barbara Streisand!
Phoooo!
Certainly worth a bump!
Those black holes are so wacky.....nothing they do will ever suprise me!
Such an optimistic can do attitude!!! she/he sounds like he has an accretion disk and intense gravitational field lying around in the back yard.
I've got an accretion disk accumulating around my middle which seems to be creating an intense gravitational field,
although the compact jets are only intermittant at this time.
Imma dummy with this stuff, but I am also amazed so I'd like to ask... If it takes minutes to get a picture per se, is that picture from 10,000 years ago??
My first thought when reading that title was "Cary Grant is STILL hot after all these years!"
Yeah, I had one of those accretion disks on my left hand ring finger too. It was definitely accompanied by an intense gravitational field. And it's now jetting a significant amount once a month and is expected to continue for the next 10 years. But I'm free of both the disk and the gravitational field, now. Just wish the jets would stop.
Perhaps as every star increases its mass, it must have a pressure relieve valve which prevents nuclear fission?
Without the jets would there in fact be a reality rip, a complete rip in the space time continuum?
The more interesting question is why and how does this energy/matter escape when all else is basically sucked in. I did not know the jets contained solid matter, and thought they were radiation plumes, largely consisting of X-rays, and radio waves.
And then there's Rock Hudson. Now that was some surprising activity. He really was acting.
Maybe, this is best illustrated by Ike and Tina Turner. A black hole can only apply so much pressure before something has to leave.
Yes... the light that left there 10,000 years ago is just getting to Earth today, so we're seeing what it looked like 10,000 years ago. To see what it looks like right now, you'll have to wait until the year 12006.
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