Sometimes regions of space-time behave very strange: they even know how to spit.
A team of scientists from the University of Sheffield, led by Vic Dillon, is studying the most mysterious objects in the Universe - black holes. They are fraught with many riddles and puzzles, each of which will take decades to solve. However, astronomers managed to make a small breakthrough and understand why the so-called "spits" of black holes start to glow. Very soon they will be able to explain the origin of the "spitting".
The object for observation was the black hole V404 from the constellation Cygnus, which relatively recently woke up from sleep. Similar objects are found in almost every galaxy. Supermassive BHs weigh several million times more than the Sun. From time to time, they absorb celestial bodies and gas, throwing out after the "meal" beams of heated plasma, which move at superluminal speed. Astronomers call them jets.
At the moment, scientists do not know what provokes the appearance of the jets. Perhaps their formation is influenced by the magnetic field of the accretion disk, or the black hole itself is involved in this. During their research, Dillon and his colleagues noticed that jets begin to glow almost immediately after their birth, which does not correspond to many theories about these phenomena. They found out one curious detail: individual parts of the jet become visible gradually, rather than immediately.
It turns out that its matter must move 30-40 thousand kilometers from the BH event horizon for telescopes to be able to record it. Further observations will help astrophysicists understand exactly how jets are born.
