From the center of a galaxy, where a black hole lurks, narrow jets of hot gas shoot out in opposite directions. They shine across vast distances, sometimes longer than the galaxy itself. How exactly a black hole launches these jets is not fully understood, but there is an elegant idea: the black hole's rotation twists magnetic fields, and they, like a spring, fling matter outward. This is called the Blandford–Znajek mechanism.
The authors of the new study built a simplified mathematical model of such a jet. They considered a slowly rotating black hole with a thin plasma disk around it. It turned out that the jet has a parabolic shape, like a stream of water from a hose that widens but not too quickly. The big surprise: the jet's parameters are almost independent of the disk's exact structure. They varied the location of currents in the disk, and the jet remained nearly the same. This hints at universality: perhaps all slowly rotating black holes launch jets in the same way, regardless of the details of their surroundings.
This model is a step toward understanding how black holes return energy to space. Jets carry matter and magnetic fields across galaxies, influencing the birth of new stars. If the mechanism is indeed universal, we could predict the behavior of distant active galaxies without delving into their internal details.
Particle speeds in jets can reach 99.9% of the speed of light — in one second, such a particle travels nearly 300,000 kilometers.
In the movie Interstellar, the black hole Gargantua is shown with an accretion disk, but no jets are visible, yet those could be the most spectacular sight.