Why Magnetic Fields Make Black Holes Quiet ⚡ экспресс
Disks of gas and dust swirl around giant black holes. It turns out their thickness crucially affects how often objects inside collide or capture each other. For example, when magnetic pressure is taken into account, the disk becomes 'puffier', and the frequency of such events drops by billions of billions of times — like the chance of meeting a friend in an empty hall versus a cramped room. So just how thick are these disks really?
At the centers of many galaxies lurk supermassive black holes, surrounded by disks of gas, cosmic dust, and stars. Their collisions can spawn gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime. The old picture, developed by Rashid Sunyaev, portrayed this disk as thin and flat, like a packed dance floor: any movement causes a bump.
New research confirms: thickness rules the fate of collisions. Thin disk — cramped, thick disk — empty. Magnetic fields threading the disk can inflate it to enormous sizes, especially in the outer regions. Then, instead of a bustling cosmic mosh pit, near-absolute silence falls.
🎯 If the disk stayed flat like a packed dance floor, collisions would thunder nonstop. But magnetic fields transform it into an empty multi-story atrium, where encounters are almost impossible.